


Kimmy Gets A Subletter! (Titus Gets An Historical Romance)

by rokhal



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Genre: Adulting, An Asshole With A Heart Of Gold, Angst and Humor, Awkward Dates, Bad Cooking, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes and the 21st Century, Bucky Barnes's Terrible Dating Advice, Canon Character of Color, Canon Gay Character, Crack Crossover, Crossover, Dong Nguyen Is Good At Many Things And Also Math, Escape, Everyone Gets A Hug, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Identity Porn, Immigration & Emigration, Kimmy Schmidt Has PTSD, Lovers to Friends, M/M, Multi, New York City, No Smut, Party Crashing, Poverty, Pride, Rescue, Secret Identity, Self-Esteem Issues, Shopping, Suit Kink, Titus Andromedon Feels, Titus Being an Asshole, Vanilla Kink, Working Under The Table
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-04-07 03:42:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14072136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: The credits toThe Bourne Identityrolled. "That's me," the stranger said."You're the hero?" Titus asked skeptically as he got up to rewind the tape. He looked nothing like Matt Damon. His jawline was superior, to start with.“No, I mean how the rogue agent knows things but doesn't know why he knows. Difference is I know I can fly a helicopter, build a bomb out of household chemicals, and field-strip an antimateriel rifle, and I got a good idea why, but I get blindsided by the normal shit I can do, like load an icebox so the meat don't get dripped on, or boil a shirt.”“Far be it from me to judge what is and is not normal,” Titus said, “but normal people don't boil shirts.”





	1. Kimmy Watches The Bourne Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the crossover you never knew you needed and the pairing you never knew you wanted.

In Richard Voorhees' Manhattan penthouse, a gathering of wealthy internationals simmered like an unattended pot of pasta: steamy, crowded, promising great things to come, and about to boil over. How momentous the occasion was depended on who you asked. To Jacqueline Voorhees, it was a critical ambush opportunity to prove her husband was trying to trade her in for a younger model; her adrenaline was up, her heels were extra high, and she had talcum powder on her knees from sprinkling it on the floor under the dining room table before her husband arrived (a critical part of her plan). Richard Voorhees thought he was hosting a business dinner to unveil a prototype home assistance robot who could cook you dinner, tie your shoes, and sing “Let's Fall In Love” while it did so.

To Kimmy Schmidt, alias Smith, Jacqueline's home assistance human and partner in crime, the gathering was her Cinderella Ball, her very first party since 1998, when she'd been kidnapped and held for fifteen years in an underground bunker in Indiana by a maniac preacher. She'd arrived in an off-shoulder black minidress, metallic gold pumps, a crystal swing necklace, and a mohair shrug; so far, none of the billionaires had realized she was just the help, and Jacqueline was far too busy to notice how the help was dressed.

Titus Andromedon, nee Richard Wilkerson, was being paid to sing. This was a welcome novelty; not the singing, but being paid. He crooned jazz standards with a circle of session musicians, swaying in a tight tux and scanning the crowd for Broadway producers; at the first sight of one he'd switch to singing _The Lion King_ and his backup had better hold tight, because Titus was going to get his break one day if it killed somebody. He also checked in on Kimmy from time to time. He'd made her outfit out of old clothes and things lying around his apartment. Kimmy's new shrug had been his bathmat. He was better than any fairy godmother, if he said so himself.

Young Logan Beekman of real-estate royalty fame saw the party as a chance to do some slumming. Richard Voorhees' business associates saw it as a place to eat free kobe hamburgers, compare their own penthouses to his, and ogle his wife. The session musicians were in it for a little rent money, maybe leftover hors d'oeurves for dinner if they were lucky. The robot was here to make her debut in a fabulous world full of admirers.

And then there was the Smooth Waiter, as Titus and Kimmy each called him privately in their heads. The acme of masculine courtesy, a vision in a tux and white gloves, he was an arresting presence. A transplant from a bygone era. Narrow black shoes, wet-gleaming, bounced and circled in time to Titus's voice; firm thighs supported a taut derriere and sturdy torso; one-handed, the Smooth Waiter raised a double-stacked tray of brimming champagne flutes without a ripple as he circled the crowd. He took coats, pulled out chairs, memorized requests. His ready smile flattered and beguiled men and women young and old. Jacqueline Voorhees, who had the power to find fault with anything, called him Ponytail Waiter. But this was his only fault.

This gathering, full of promise, would collapse into chaos after reaching its inevitable boiling point: Jacqueline would fail to expose her husband and attempt to murder his robot with an axe, an brawl would empty the penthouse, Titus would miss his shot at Broadway but instead land a steady but humiliating job as a singing werewolf in a Transylvania-themed restaurant, and Kimmy would capture the eye of Logan Beekman, losing one shoe and everything.

 

* * *

 

Though Kimmy and Titus spent a fair portion of that fateful night gazing star-struck at the Smooth Waiter, he passed out of mind quickly after the party: Titus had six days to teach himself all the special effects makeup from _An American Werewolf in London_ , and Kimmy had a date with Prince Charming.

Or, Kimmy would have had a date with Prince Charming, except that two nights after the party, Charming Sr.'s limousine drove over an embankment, throwing Sr. straight through the glass moonroof and impaling him on three lengths of rebar that happened to be lying around in a nearby construction site: one in the head and two in the chest. This was why, Jacqueline explained to Kimmy the following morning, the funeral they would be attending in four days would have a closed casket.

“Poor Logan!” Kimmy exclaimed.

“Now is _not_ the time to make a move on the bereaved,” Jacqueline said severely. “Talk about long odds. Now is when all the Beekman family's enemies, allies, and acquaintances come together to show respect for the Beekman legacy. Every funeral is a social slaughterhouse. I need you with me, by my side, as a show of strength. I can't look lonely in front of Richard.”

Richard had, in fact, been cheating on Jacqueline, a fact which slipped out during their couples' therapy session after the party. He had been cheating on her with their couples' therapist.

Kimmy put a firm hand on Jacqueline's shoulder. “I am here for you. You will get through this. I'll help you however you need.”

 

* * *

 

The day of the funeral saw Kimmy perched on an upper balcony of the cathedral clutching her cell phone and a set of opera glasses Jacqueline had provided, watching the crowd for a Lydia Thornbustle. Down in the crowd, Jacqueline was “catching up” with Lydia's boyfriend Justin Hammer of Hammer Industries, in the time that Lydia had left for the bathroom. Both Jacqueline's and Kimmy's phones were set to vibrate. Jacqueline's was concealed on one of her tiny thighs, strapped in place by a jogging armband. She and Kimmy had a predetermined code. One buzz meant the girlfriend was in the room. Two meant the girlfriend was moving toward them. Three meant Jacqueline had been seen.

It all felt very important and grown-up.

A man coughed behind her. Kimmy gasped and spun around, raising the opera glasses like a bludgeon. The man shifted his weight back and tracked the opera glasses mildly. He wore a long black coat, like her, and gloves, and carried a wool slouch cap in one hand. He wore his dark hair tied back, and his blue eyes were calm and curious. “Nice view up here,” he remarked.

“Don't you touch me,” Kimmy growled. When he stayed put, she said, friendlier, “I know you. You were that cool waiter. What are you doing here?”

“Enjoying the view, same as you.” He leaned on the railing beside her, peering down at the crowd as though bored. “Mind I ask who you work for?”

Kimmy pointed out Jacqueline in the crowd and outlined the key points of Jacqueline's plan, born of spite and financial insecurity, to trade up from Richard Voorhees to Justin Hammer. “I see that smirk, mister,” Kimmy interrupted herself, advancing on him. “Mrs. Voorhees is in a rough spot right now, and she needs all the support I can give her.”

“Lydia Thornbustle,” he said, pointing subtly.

Kimmy whirled and raised her opera glasses. “Foozball! Where?”

He guided her lenses onto Lydia's bone-straight blonde bob, quickly and accurately without actually touching her or crowding her at any time. “Target sighted,” Kimmy hissed, and carefully signaled Jacqueline, letting the phone ring once before hanging up.

“I like your style,” the man remarked after she finished. Kimmy checked the buttons on the black overcoat Jacqueline had lent her: there was no funereal black dress underneath, as Jacqueline had decided that it was good enough to put a nice coat over Kimmy's candy-colored street clothes and have Kimmy wear it tightly closed for the entire service. “I remember you. You wore that swell party frock made out of a pair of short-pants and nobody noticed because it made your legs look a mile long.”

“You noticed,” said Kimmy, blushing.

“Adidas,” he said. “I'm trained to look for insignia.”

They surveyed the crowd below, silent: Kimmy bouncing her opera glasses between Mrs. Voorhees and Ms. Thornbustle, and the man gazing down as though taking in the whole scene at once.

“So I told you why I'm here,” Kimmy muttered as she tracked Ms. Thornbustle through the crowd. “Why are you here, Mr. Waiter-Who's-Trained-To-Look-For-Insignia-On-Little-Black-Dresses?” She listened, but did not bother to look away from her opera glasses as she waited. The man noticed this with puzzlement.

“What if I told you,” he said slowly, “that Beekman Senior was a very bad man?”

“Then I'd wonder what's bad about him, and whether his friends know, and how sure you are that you know. Also, I'd wonder if you'd maybe K I L L'd him.”

“He was a senior officer in a Nazi-affiliated criminal organization. I've seen twelve people down there signal each-other that they belong to the same group. His area was human trafficking. And I'm very, very sure.”

“Human trafficking is kidnapping people,” Kimmy said, for clarification.

“To start.”

“If you told me that,” Kimmy said, just as slowly, “then I'd shake your hand. And I wouldn't tell anyone else unless I thought you were going to go on K I L L'ing people willy-nilly. But you don't do that, do you?”

“No, I've never killed people willy-nilly. And I won't start.” He swallowed and gazed solemnly over the crowd. Kimmy scooted next to him so their elbows bumped, and he smiled in surprise. “Say,” the man said after a long silence. “Do you know any cheap tenements for let around here?”

 

* * *

 

Titus Andromedon returned to his basement apartment, exhausted, baffled, and sweating under his 18 th  century werewolf getup, to find Kimmy and a dark-haired, blue-eyed, and very stacked white man sharing his couch and a load of takeout from a diner in Manhattan. He stopped in the doorway and took a deep, settling breath from the belly. “Kimmy,” he said, and raised one eyebrow under the heavy latex.

“Hi, Titus!”

“Kimbeline,” he repeated. He jerked his head repeatedly at the bathroom.

“You look super cool! Titus, this is—”

“Kimblivious, come to the bathroom, I need to talk to you in private about something that has nothing at all to do with this lovely young man,” Titus insisted, helping Kimmy up and ushering her along by her elbow. He shut the door and planted his foot against it because the lock did not work. “Kimmy, you've been sparkling all week to meet your new sugar daddy, but I have to cut this off at the pass. That isn't Logan Beekman.”

“Ugh, no, Logan's dad was a Nazi and what if Logan knew about it? No, that's our new subletter! He's a super-spy!”

“You got a subletter?”

“He lost his memory, he's all alone, he thinks the people who trained him and took his memory made him do all kinds of horrible things and are probably still out there hurting people. He just wants a place to stay that isn't under a bridge or eight thousand dollars a month and to not get treated like he's weird.”

“That is almost the exact plot of _The Bourne Identity._ And this apartment has two bedrooms! My suite, and your . . . your suitelette! Kim, I am not easy enough to share my intimate living space with a charismatic waiter who goes around telling strangers he's Matt Damon!”

“We figured it all out. He'll sleep on a mat on the living room floor! He can't handle enclosed spaces, and he says he'll just sleep for four hours in the middle of the afternoon, then roll everything back up. It'll be like he isn't even there!”

“Kimmy that is inhumane and despicable. To do that to that poor man! Especially since he has no money.”

“I have money,” called the stranger through the door. “What's _The Bourne Identity?”_

Titus and Kimmy crept out of the bathroom, and the man showed Titus the stacks of fifties that occupied half his duffel bag. The other half was very heavy and made metallic clunking noises when the bag shifted. Titus stared down in shock.

“I have conditions,” the stranger said. “I'll pick up half the rent. But. Regarding the bag: nobody looks in the bag. Regarding the notebooks: nobody reads my notebooks. Regarding the bathroom: nobody comes in the bathroom when I'm dressing. Regarding HUMINT: if anybody asks for me, you've never seen me. For my part, I'll be quick in the shower and I won't leave any shit lying around for you to try to explain to your friends or trip on.”

“That is some Bluebeard Room shadiness,” Titus said. “Or the Scarlet Ribbon. What happens if someone slips up?”

“What's _The Bourne Identity_?” Kimmy interrupted.

It turned out that neither the stranger nor Kimmy had ever seen _The Bourne Identity._ Titus fished a battered VHS tape out of his closet and they all sat down on the couch to rectify this travesty. “It's a pivotal piece of your culture,” Titus informed them. “I'm saving you from years of shame and confusion.”

“Isn't this an old movie like James Bond?” Kimmy asked.

“Who's James Bond?”

“Don't make fun of Kimmy,” Titus growled at the man, who lowered his eyes. “No, this is the remake. With Matt Damon wrestling with his inner demons and with his former brothers-in-arms!”

They watched _The Bourne Identity_ and ate the take-out. Kimmy pumped her fists at the explosions. The stranger sat very straight on the couch as though attempting to memorize the entire film. As the film ended, and Titus looked at the clock, he realized that Kimmy had, indeed, found them a subletter. Kicking him out into the night would be too cruel.

“That's me,” said the man as Titus rewound the tape.

“You're the hero?” Titus asked skeptically.

“No, not like that; I mean how the rogue agent knows things but doesn't know why he knows. Difference is I know I can fly a helicopter, build a bomb out of household chemicals, and field-strip an antimateriel rifle, and I got a good idea why, but I get blindsided by the normal shit I can do, like load an icebox so the meat don't get dripped on, or boil a shirt.”

“Far be it from me to judge what is and is not normal,” Titus said, “but normal people don't boil shirts.”

The man dropped his head into his hands abruptly. “I can't go back.”

“Don't you dare!” Kimmy growled. He looked up at her in confusion. “No matter how scary and lonely it is outside, you're free now! You're strong, and your life is yours and no-one else's! Don't you ever go back!”

“Thanks, kid. You're right. The thing is, _I'm_ not right. I don't fit anywhere. I came to New York hoping it'd jog some memory, but it's too strange anymore, and anyone who knows me, I can't see again or don't want to. But you're right. Things could be worse.”

Kimmy slowly but firmly hugged him.

“Well, someone steered you right,” Titus said. “You've come ashore at the Island of Misfit Toys. You'll fit right in.”

 _Misfit toys?_ The man mouthed to himself. Kimmy, blinking back tears as she stared at the man's gloved hand in hers, did not notice. “Sometimes. When you're in a really awful situation that you can't change, it's nice to take a vacation. Only in your head. So, for example, if you're trapped in an underground bunker with a maniac preacher, you can tell yourself, maybe you're lucky. Maybe there really was a Scarypocalypse outside and you're one of the only people to survive on Earth. Just pretend in your head that what happened to you wasn't so bad, and then it won't make any difference how bad things actually are, but you'll feel better about them.”

“Ah,” the man breathed.

“But it's just a vacation,” Kimmy added hurriedly. “Just a few days at a time, or you'll go crazy.”

The man's eyes were wide, and he did not react to Kimmy's addition. “ _Da,_ _da,_ okay. Okay.” He patted Kimmy on the shoulder and paced around the living room for a minute, occasionally muttering to himself. “I got it. I got it! I'm not a—I'm a longshoreman from the Bronx. There was an accident on the docks and I hit my head, I lost all my memory and it's never coming back. They kicked me outta the hospital 'cause I got no money and no family. I fell in with a bad crowd, did bad things. All the HYDRA shit was a hallucination on account of all the nose powder I snorted, and too much Buck Rogers and capitalist propaganda. I got outta the gang and off the coke. I'm nobody. Nobody wants me, nobody's looking for me. I don't got any access codes. My left arm is covered in burn scars and offensive tattoos.” There was a bounce in his step and he seemed to be floating. “My name's Roger Gordon, born 1981.” He stuck out his hand for Titus to shake, grinning to light up his face. “Pleased ta meetcha.”

Dumbstruck and filled with foreboding, Titus shook it.

 


	2. Titus Gets A Hobby

True to his word, Roger was quick in the shower, paid a larger-than-customary chunk of the rent, took a brief catnap like a vampire in the middle of the day, and left the living room clean whenever he was out. He wore long sleeves and gloves at all times. 

Roger Gordon would have remained a liminal presence—a faint scent of gun oil in the air, the Bluebeard Duffle Bag in the coat closet, and a garbage can perpetually full of take-out packaging—had not Kimmy invited him to her birthday party out of desperation to prove she had friends who hadn't come out of a bunker. This party, also, was a mixture of miracle and disaster, with the disasters more immediately apparent.

Kimmy's birthday party took place at 8:00 pm in the living room of their apartment—Roger's bedroom—so he could hardly not be invited. Titus lent Kimmy a dresser and a card table for refreshments and provided music that neither Kimmy nor Roger had acquired a taste for. Kimmy had spent her whole birthday reserve fund on a makeover at a department store, a hot pink dress (second hand) that turned out to have an impervious stain on the rump, and a pair of heels (also second hand) that she could not walk in. Because she had no free cash remaining, the party was bring-your-own-beer. Titus donated a few two-liter bottles of store-brand pop. Roger, looking shy and unreasonably pleased with himself, contributed twelve cans of sardines and two packs of expired saltine crackers, which Kimmy and Titus both felt to be unfit for human consumption. Dong Nguyen from GED class, who was the closest fit to Kimmy's idea of a  _normal friend_ , got hit on the head by a falling chunk of frozen condensation from a window air conditioner on the way over and spent almost the whole party chattering with Roger in Vietnamese while Roger held a cold cloth to his head wound and examined his pupils. 

Kimmy's step-half-sister Kymmi and Kimmy's estranged father-in-law _crashed_ the party, and Kimmy spent hours she would have preferred to spend talking to Dong instead squabbling with, and then chasing down, a girl who was half her age but her unfortunate equal in maturity. By the time they located and returned with Kymmi, the food and drinks had been put away, Dong and Roger were both gone, there was Victor Frankenstein's bicycle in the coat closet with a note reading _Happy Birthday Kimmy_ in Dong's careful block print, and Kimmy was fighting enraged, frustrated tears.

The first miracle showed itself at the end of Kimmy and Dong's next GED class. Dong followed her out the door and poked her in the elbow. 

“Hi, Dong,” she said. “Thanks for the bike. I love it.”

“Oh, it ain't no thing,” said Dong carefully. He steeled himself, reached down, and folded one hand around hers. “Kimmy. I am learning American culture as fast as I can learn. In case I do things wrong, I gotta tell you,” here he took hold with both hands, “Kimmy, you're my first flame and my best girl. When I take out other girls, you talk to them, they will tell you, that Dong Nguyen, he is a stand-up guy and no L-seven. They will tell you I pick up the tab and never take advantage. Then, when I ask you will you step out with me, maybe you say let's go steady.”

Kimmy rocked back. Her first instinct was to step away; she had spent years fantasizing about winning herself a normal boyfriend who wasn't taped together out of old soup cans, but Can Man had never been a cranky Vietnamese national who took notes on sports movies. On the other hand, the thought of Dong romancing other girls made her clench her fists. “Why not practice with me first?”

Dong blinked, and dug a notebook out of his back pocket. He flipped through several pages without avail and looked back up at her. “How is that practice?”

“Well, we can date a few times, three times, for practice, and then if we both like dating, we can start again for real,” Kimmy explained.

Dong held his breath for nearly a minute and his hands trembled faintly. “No pressure.” He put his notebook back in his pocket and took her hand. “Kimmy, will you come to Esoteric Groceries with me to eat food samples tonight. After, we will covert-infiltrate a movie theater.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


After the party, Roger began to use the apartment while Kimmy and Titus were in it. He hung around on the couch, writing in Cyrillic in his many blank notebooks and reading old foreign newspaper articles and conspiracy theories he'd printed out at the library. He bought a pot, and made gallons of soup that simmered continuously, filling the apartment with steam and a homey smell that belied that the potatoes and vegetables were blemished produce Roger had begged off the Chinese restaurant where Dong worked, and the meat was usually a mix of necks, gizzards, and feet. He ate like a dozen Irish pensioners. 

Kimmy thought it was tasty. Kimmy thought anything that didn't come out of a can was tasty. 

One Saturday afternoon that spring, he and Kimmy took a field trip to the farmer's market that came to Brooklyn once a week. They stuck close together, both stunned and gaping at the tent booths, the milling yuppies and hipsters and hippies, the children strapped into elaborate strollers, the rows of fruit, the walls of greens. It was an overcast day with patches of sun, just cool enough that Roger was not out of place in his long sleeves. He twisted and slithered through the crowd, drifting with the flow and sliding through gaps in foot traffic, guiding Kimmy in his wake with the ease of long and forgotten practice. A girl at a fruit stall offered him a June strawberry to sample. Roger never turned down free food.

As he bit into the strawberry, the sun broke through the clouds and he began to sniffle. He wiped his eyes with his glove, found Kimmy, navigated out of the crowd to stand beside a dumpster and collect himself. 

“Are you allergic?” Kimmy asked, confused. His eyes were red and puffy.

“I thought I imagined it,” Roger replied, hoarse. “How good these are. It tastes like I remember. It was real. Oh, God.”

“I remember my first fruit roll-up after I got . . . back,” Kimmy said. “It was totally overwhelming.”

Rogers took a long sniff. “I want to try that too. First we gotta buy some of that real fruit.”

They returned giddy and laden with two cases of delicate little ripe strawberries and pounds of vegetables that none of them had any idea what they were. Most of the vegetables went into Roger's soup pot, and in six hours it didn't matter what they'd been to begin with, except for the leeks. The leeks were delicious in the soup.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Roger spent less and less time with his notebooks, stashing them in the ceiling of the coat closet with his sheaves of library print-outs about unsolved murders of diplomats and heads of state. Occasionally he would look at the closet guiltily as he filled out job applications or read tourist guides to New York and other major cities. The hours he spent on the couch gave Titus plenty of opportunity to stare suspiciously at him and compare his face with historical photos online. 

Titus observed him closely over four days, then soothed himself through a short nervous breakdown on the fifth day. He claimed laryngitis at the Monster Palace and the restaurant made do with a mute werewolf. On the sixth day, he used as a mantra, “don't interfere, don't interfere, you are out of your depth Titus Andromedon, it would be hypocritical and dangerous to interfere.” On the seventh day, he said, “Did you know that Bucky Barnes was the catalyst of my sexual awakening?”

Titus watched Roger stiffen, then blink when he puzzled through the phrase “sexual awakening.”

“He was?” Roger asked carefully.

“I was in seventh grade,” Titus recounted, a shiver of adrenaline fading away, “and I had to write a biography report on a hero of World War II. Naturally, I started reading about Gabe Jones, because every brother writing about World War II has to either write about Gabe Jones or explain why not. Of course I love Gabe Jones, Gabe Jones was a hero to the people, but seemed like half the boys in my class were writing reports on Gabe Jones; the material had been explored. But something about Bucky Barnes awakened something in little middle-school Titus Andromedon, because out of all the Howling Commandos, Bucky Barnes was The Hot One.”

“Huh,” said Roger.

“I say this because you and the historical Bucky Barnes look eerily alike, and the resemblance is distracting me.”

“That's why you been staring at me, because you're distracted,” Roger clarified.

“Exactly.”

They smiled falsely at each-other.

“You think I'm hot.”

“I think you'd clean up okay,” Titus sniffed. “Why, does that flatter you? Does that feed your ego?”

“You think I look like some schmuck who's been dead seventy years. Flowers might be in order.”

Titus ambled around the living room, throwing quick glances at Roger while Roger, pretending to fill out a McDonald's application, threw quick glances up at him. “There's more to learn about Bucky Barnes than I found at my middle school library,” Titus continued. “For instance. Mister Barnes and his sidekick Proto-Captain-America spent three years in a very gay neighborhood in Brooklyn, at the time the gayest borough in all New York and possibly the world. Nowadays Brooklyn is very different. It's been gentrified. A different set of people took it over. However. History doesn't venture to say what Mister Barnes and Mister America meant by living three years in a single apartment in the gayest neighborhood in all New York. Maybe the rent was cheap. But history does say, in every biography and every textbook, that Mister Barnes was a party animal. And who throws the greatest parties in every era?”

“The proletariat?”

“ _The gays,_ ” Titus said sternly. “So, Roger Gordon. What would you say, if I took you out clubbing, that means partying, with me tomorrow night when I get off work? I can't stay out past three, though, I'm not twenty-two anymore.”

Roger furrowed his brow. Titus fancied he could hear the gears grinding in his head—he could hear gears grinding somewhere. At last, Roger said, “Well, I got no Mamma to cry over me, and no Pa to belt me in the nose. I think that's a swell idea.” He grinned up at Titus, exactly like the historical Bucky Barnes.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“I love the future!” Roger Gordon rambled as he and Titus stumbled back down the steps of the apartment at four AM. “I love Beyoncé! I love America! I love flavored vodka!” Roger had consumed enough alcohol to kill a horse and embalm its carcass, and was moderately drunk. Titus was well-past moderately drunk, because Roger had bought him drinks all night to be sociable.

“Shh, shh, Kimmy sleeping,” Titus hissed, and Roger shook himself, took hold of the door with two hands, one on the knob and one on one of the decorative panels, and opened it so slowly and firmly that there was no sound. He looked both ways and stalked in on silent feet. “That's creepy shh, too shushy,” Titus said, turning on the light.

Roger unlaced his shoes, took them to the kitchen, and began to wipe sticky spots off them. He was in the pants, shirt, and suspenders from his waiter getup, and his special-occasion gloves. Titus leaned against the wall and watched him. Roger appeared to own three outfits, including the suit, and he fussed over them like he'd been raised in the Great Depression. “I'm happy,” Roger said, as though he'd only just realized it.

“Izzat a 'thank-you, Titus?'”

“Thank-you, Titus.” He set his shoes down on the counter, slumped heavily to the floor, and began to cry silently. His hair fell over his face. 

Titus pushed himself off the wall and wobbled over. “Oh, honey, sweetiecakes, don't cry, buckybabe.” He lowered himself to the floor beside him, got up, wiped the floor with a dishtowel, and sat down again, wrapping his arm, still holding the towel, around Roger's broad shoulders. “You'll make your face all puffy. You white boys age like . . . like . . . oh, I am drunk.”

Roger stopped crying by breathing very slowly and carefully.

“You're young and gorgeous, and you have money, and a roof over your head, and you got propositioned by so many beautiful men tonight, and you can pull off suspenders and a fedora without looking like a meninist . . . of course you're happy. Life iz beautiful and you deserve it.”

Roger leaned into Titus's arm. “You've a right to your opinion,” he rasped. 

“Of course I'm right. I am the most streetwise person in this apartment. Everyone knows that.” Titus gripped the countertop, scuffed his feet, slumped again. “Now help me up. I may vomit.”

 

 


	3. Dong Is A Smooth Criminal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in end notes.

Kimmy and Dong's first date went well: Esoteric Groceries had old ladies offering bite-sized portions of gluten-free cinnamon rolls and frozen vegan lasagna at every second aisle, so they circled around and scammed extra samples until they accumulated enough for a picnic lunch, which they ate in romantic shade under the floral display table. When a manager stooped down to evict them, they both pretended not to speak English and ran out the door toward the movie theater two blocks down. On the way a gang of construction workers yelled incomprehensible American innuendo at Kimmy; the innuendo went right over Kimmy's head, and Dong shut them up by stepping around Kimmy and throwing them the sarcastic “Big boy, me so horny, me love you long time!” line he'd learned from his longsuffering Chinese roommate. One of the construction workers turned beet red and stared at Dong until he fell backwards down an open man-hole, and the rest of the men had to stop cat-calling and fish him out. They reached the theater without further incident. By a rope with a hook and a technique from Roger, Dong snagged the theater's fire escape ladder and they climbed up and slunk down the unlocked roof access—someone hadn't ever wanted to be trapped on the roof during their smoke break. They perched on the catwalk beside the projector, looking down on the screen and the people dotting the auditorium for the matinee showing. The movie was _127 Hours._ Kimmy watched with pragmatic interest.

Resolved to top this first success, Dong watched and listened and thought for two weeks before asking Kimmy out to a second date.

Using a new Discover card, Dong purchased a brand new embroidered Mets snapback with a holographic sticker on the rim. He left the fifty dollar pricetag dangling.

Kimmy met him at eight in the evening, wobbling on the bike he had compiled for her, wearing her pink thrift store dress with a pair of teal jean-shorts on top and the skirt edges sticking out each leg hole, and Roger's combat boots. Dong put on the ballcap and a caftan he'd made for the occasion from a floral tablecloth he'd fished out of the trash.

He secured their bikes to a light post, and got them each a can of soup out of the milk crate strapped to his rear fender. The soup cans were from the Food Bank.

The cost of admission to the album launch party in the record store's basement was a canned item for the Food Bank.

It wasn't a particularly exclusive launch party—a blond stoner slouched by the door with the Food Bank barrel while home-cooked House music pulsed within—but Dong managed to fumble his can, mis-read the poster, and get hung up at the door for a good twenty seconds. When the stoner rose to help him, Dong apologized—“My English no good”—waved his can of stew around aimlessly until the stoner said, “Hey, aren't you that Korean guy?” and Dong seized the opportunity, pointed at Kimmy, and exclaimed, “I'm with her! All good, I'm with her!”

“Hi! That cigarette smells weird!” Kimmy greeted the man as Dong melted against her side, handing her his can. Kimmy dropped the cans into the barrel, trotted in with the skirt of her pink dress flapping out the legs of her shorts, and Dong slithered after her. It was hard to catch English words when they were muttered or slang or spoken in unusual dialects, but he saw the effect he had made: everyone had to be seen with Kimmy, had to find out or pretend to know who she was.

The DJ whose album they celebrated gave them a good two hours of bopping up and down in the flashing lights, but Kimmy was now the star of the show. The party bopped in her orbit, and she shone. Dong hoped she felt as special as she was to him; that was, after all, what a date with a stand-up guy was all about.

The next day, Dong returned his spotless Mets ballcap for a refund.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Roger got a job as a bike messenger. He broke the sprocket of his dubiously-acquired mountain bike on his first day, yet completed his deliveries on foot. His second sprocket lasted two weeks, but by then his tires were worn down. Somehow the left handlebar crumpled. He spent two hours on the living room floor surrounded by bike parts, switching the left-hand brake onto the right handlebar. Because he spent about a quarter of his messenger pay on bike repair, he took a second job as a bouncer in a gentleman's club owned by the Russian mob so he could make up food and rent without dipping too often into the stash in his duffel bag.

He had other uses for the stash in his duffel bag.

“I gotta see a barber one of these days,” Roger remarked, pulling his hair back in a fist.

“Haaaaalelujah!” Titus sang.

“It's too easy to grab and if it's not tied back, I can't see at all.”

“Tarzan, I know a man who can trim you back into Tony Curtis. If I can persuade him.” His brow furrowed.

“Who's Tony Curtis?”

Titus shook his head slowly at Roger. “Dock Boy, you are a never-ending tragedy. Tonight we're gonna watch _Some Like It Hot._ ”

Early the next week, Titus took Roger to the hairdresser frequented by his ex with the most fabulous hair. As they entered the glassy space, they slammed into a wall of chemical vapors. Roger surveyed the huge windows, the single exit, the tile floor, the reclining chair, and stopped short. “I don't think I should do this.”

“Honey, nobody's making you give up your hair. Get a trim and a blow-out.”

“I'll cut it myself.”

Titus stifled a cry. “But I abased myself—I got you this appointment—I have terrible history with this place—”

“Okay,” Roger said. He put his head down and paced just outside the shop, muttering to himself in Russian, _what do I have, what do I need._ “ _Da._ Yes. No. Fuck me with a trombone.” He cut sharp glances out at the shopping center and into the salon. “ _What do I have, what do I need._ ”

The proprietor, a lanky Orlando Bloom type, appeared at the threshold, startling Titus. “Andronicus, where's my client? We're live in three minutes.” He raised his voice and called to Roger, “Beat it! You're scaring my clientele!”

Titus bristled. “ _There_ is your client,” he said, pointing. “And it would hoove you, if you have the ability, to show some respect. He just got back from the war.”

“Oh,” said the proprietor, widening his fine brown eyes. “I understand. Which theater?”

“Kazraqismalia,” Titus replied. “Very hush-hush.”

Roger interrupted the proprietor's scrutiny by a sudden and wide-eyed return. “Nothin' too bad ever happened to a fella sittin' on a stool, right? You got a stool?”

“I could take the back off an office chair,” he proposed in a perfectly reasonable voice, and offered his hand. Titus goggled at them. “Thank-you for your service.”

While Titus waited on the window seat that served as the lobby, New York's finest men's hair stylist got Roger's hair washed and combed. “I want it long enough that I can comb it forward to hide my face from above and from the side,” Roger said when the hairdresser asked how to cut it, “but too short for an easy grab. Not memorable, but not so's I look like a square either.”

“I feel like you're asking me for some Sam Winchester-style abomination,” he said with a grimace, “but you've got the cheekbones to get away with a lot of dubious ideas.”

As Titus perused the fashion magazines in the vestibule, he glanced up between pages of pretty white boys to watch the grand tyrant of Caucasian men's hair speaking slowly and gently and telegraphing each snip of his scissors in the mirror as he shaped Roger's mop into something that no longer brought to mind Leo DeCaprio in _The Revenant._ Roger just brought out the best in everyone, he supposed. 

Thirty minutes later the proprietor ushered them back out into the streets. Roger was energized, and Titus could barely stand to look at him: it was like gazing at the sun, or Julie Andrews. Roger took off his right glove and fluffed his hair artfully, using a nearby shop window as a mirror. “This pomade sets up pretty dry,” he remarked. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Yes,” Titus said. “It's supposed to look exactly like that.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth. 

Roger squinted at himself, then dropped his eyes away to look at his boots. “I did this before. I think . . . when I was feeling flush, I'd get myself a shave and a real haircut. I liked it. And the rest of the time my ma cut my hair.” He looked up. “She had two little gold rings. A plain band for her wedding ring, and one with a little blue stone on her middle finger. It was my grandma's; my dad proposed with it but she had to wear it on her middle finger because her hands were small. I don't know her face but I remember her rings.”

“Boy, control yourself before you turn into a Hallmark Original Movie.”

“Sure thing,” Roger said, straightening and pasting on a grin. He checked the grin in the window, adjusted it a little, and when he was satisfied and Titus was blinded again, they resumed walking. “So that's my hair sorted. Thanks for getting me in.”

“Honey, that was all your handsome face and your fistfuls of Benjamins,” Titus demurred. “And only a small piece of my dignity, but what's a little maiming of the soul between friends?”

“Is that what we are?” Roger mused.

Titus continued to invite Roger out clubbing with him. They made it a weekly adventure, pinballing around the city through gay clubs and straight clubs and drag revues and speakeasies and hiphop clubs and twenty-four-hour diners. Titus put his foot down on the third night. “You have got to expand your wardrobe,” he scolded when Roger emerged from the bathroom in the same dress shirt, slacks, and kid gloves he had worn when they had first encountered each-other.

“I got a fresh tie on,” Roger protested.

“That's accessorizing! That don't help that you go out in the same look every night!”

They added a shopping routine to their clubbing routine. With Titus's guidance, Rogers purchased a blue cashmere V-neck sweater, crocodile-embossed satin skinny pants—“They're practically long-johns, are you sure this is decent?”—fire-engine-red Vans, four dress shirts in bold colors, and a trilby hat. Roger had an eye for quality and versatility, Titus had an eye for Roger and flair, and they spent as many hours as their jobs let them spare, and handfuls of Roger's fifties, at upscale department stores.

At night, Roger put their selections to the test.

A well-dressed Roger could slither to the front of the line at any dance venue, like a spawning salmon powering upstream, dragging Titus in his wake. Once inside, though, Roger would dart away on his own agenda. He would scope out the dance floor, faking nonchalance in a convenient shadow, then the moment Titus blinked he would be gone, chatting up the hottest person in the entire building and convincing them to show him their best dance moves. Male, female, nonbinary, it did not matter—Roger infallibly buzzed his way through the most beautiful, charismatic, and athletic people in New York, pausing only to buy Titus drinks. Then he would collect a couple—or three, or five—of his new hot friends, grab Titus and a booth, and moderate a round-table discussion about whatever it turned out his hot friends cared about: urban planning, sometimes. Socialism. Television. Orthodonture. Cats. Titus had to take his cues from Roger at these discussions, because Roger always had a new cover story—he was an actor from Romania, for instance. He was a former Olympic rhythmic gymnast. He was never an amnesiac longshoreman from the Bronx.

No matter the topic, Roger eventually swung the conversation around to, “But that's nothing. Titus here's a singer, you know? A real up-and-comer. Damn, I wish God gave me a talent like that. Won't you sing us something from that show you like?” 

And then Titus would belt out “The Circle Of Life” or whatever had gotten stuck in his head while he'd been wandering around the club sipping Roger's drinks and trying not to look as neglected as he felt, and then before Roger's hot friends had finished applauding, Roger would sweep him out of the booth, and he and Roger would finally hit the dance floor. Titus would groove a little, trying not to tangle his feet (by this time the floor was always rippling beneath him like a ship in a storm), while Roger would boogie away in front of him.

Roger was a two-hundred pound vodka-fueled dance-crazed hummingbird. He did the Jitterbug, which looked like a sped-up funky chicken on the verge of falling on his face. He did the Dougie. He rode a pony Gangnam style. He tapdanced and cripwalked. He moonwalked around Titus in tight circles. He could hover on the tips of his toes for minutes at a time. From a split on the floor he could leap into the air clicking his heels together. He could touch his toes in midair, over and over again. From a handstand, he could jump up and down from arm to arm. He simply never got tired: after an hour or two of hard dancing, he was sweaty and tousled, but his steps were as sharp as ever, and his grin grew brighter as the night went on. 

By the time Roger started showing off for Titus, it was almost closing. They would stagger out of the club into the chill and noisy night, and Roger, backlit by neon, would ask if they could go out again next week, and Titus, dazzled and drunk, would say yes.

They were not, Titus knew, dating. Roger Gordon was a brain-damaged blue collar worker with hideous scars under his sleeves and no one else in the world, who needed Titus's wisdom to induct him into the gay scene. The whole thing was a dreadful waste of Titus's time, except Titus figured he might need the karma.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Kimmy confronted Roger as he straightened his tie on his way out of the apartment to leave for his bouncer job. “Do you even remember you're on vacation?” she demanded. “You don't research conspiracy theories anymore. There's cobwebs on your scary spy gear bags. What happened to stopping the people who did this to you? What if they hurt someone else?”

“I'm not the only guy who hates their guts,” Roger said. “I'm making it a permanent vacation. I quit.” He strode out and slammed the door.

Kimmy rushed out after him, a bracing retort ready, but she could not see him anywhere on the street.

The next time he saw Kimmy he was fussing over his latest pot of meat-scrap-and-vegetable-discard stew. She had a determined scowl, had planted her orange sneakers on the linoleum.

“I got it sorted,” he said, before she could speak. “I hired a contractor. But I don't want to fight anymore. I'm done. I'm handing it off.”

That evening, Titus watched Roger check his ringing phone, leap up, and shut himself into the bathroom. He eavesdropped shamelessly.

“The package was still in the locker, right? . . . That's not a problem. . . . Yes, it's for you. I'm paying you, here, and I'm paying you to sow some confusion. _Assume the fucking identity._ . . . I don't know, wrap your arm in duck tape or something. . . . What do you mean it's not big enough, it covers half my fucking face. Wear the goggles. . . . He won't mind. . . . I know he won't mind. . . . One, because he's a fucking robot, two, because he's dead. . . . I saw the body. I cut out the arm, thought I could sell it. You want a picture?”

There was a rustling noise, and after a few minutes, the sound of a cell phone camera shutter, several tries. It was some time before the conversation resumed.

“He was just a robot,” Roger said weakly, replying to the other end of the line. “ _I_ didn't kill him. He's _not going to care._ Hell, honor his fucking memory or something, if he could think he'd be doing just what I'm paying you for, anyway. . . . What's a leather daddy?”

There was a long silence from Roger. At last he said, “I changed my mind. I won't be reading the obits. I want these fucks to make front page news. . . . I knew you were the right guy for the job.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Casual racism and homophobia in some scenes. A major character steals from the Food Bank.
> 
> Notes:
> 
> Stealth cameo here! Intrepid readers will be rewarded!
> 
>  _127 Hours_ , movie, 2010. "On April 26, 2003, Aron Ralston wormed his way down into a tight little crevice in the wilds of Utah. Five days later, he came out again—or, at least, most of him did." 
> 
> Tony Curtis, American actor popular in the 1950's and 1960's, who first went to acting school in 1947. Best known for his role in the 1959 cross-dressing comedy _Some Like It Hot_ costarring Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemon. IMDB remarks on his "pretty boy looks," "distinctive Bronx accent," and "thick black hair with curly forelock."
> 
>  _The Revenant_ , 2015, an extreme whump film, all hurt, no comfort, which rips off Rob Roy except for the happy ending, and cuts away from an implied castration-by-vengeful-hostage scene while happily providing a CGI mauling-by-bear and its lovingly researched aftermath of debility, necrosis, and sloughing. Very nice rubber horse intestines. They tried hard. Leo DeCaprio has terrible hair.
> 
> I wrote most of this fic after bingeing every episode of Leverage. This will become more and more apparent.


	4. Titus Meets A Tailor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the kissing part.

Lillian the landlady met Roger in the best way possible.

“Titus!” she rasped from the front steps as Titus trudged home from the library to put on his frock coat and facial prostheses before heading to work. “Come look! Some rich vandal stuck a creepy statue to our fire escape!” She whisked off in a whirl of skirts and curly gray hair. Titus figured the theme restaurant could wait three extra minutes and followed. 

There was indeed a creepy figure attached to the fire escape. It was a human form suspended upside down, feet shoulder-width apart and toes pointed skyward, clinging to a strut by one hand. As they watched, it began to tremble, sending shivers and groans up and down the rusted poles, and briefly hooked a foot into a guardrail. When the tremors stopped, it straightened the foot up to the sky again and slowly, deliberately, ascended hand-over-hand, upside down. Something sparkled in the weak light as it fell: a drop of sweat from the man's scalp.

“Sweet baby Jesus in the straw,” Titus choked, drawing one hand toward his chin.

“Hold me,” Lilian breathed. They watched, awestruck, as the man summitted the fire escape, turned one hundred eighty degrees, and descended as slowly as he had climbed, still using only his two hands and holding himself away from the bars at an improbable angle. At the bottom, he dropped lightly down and leaned against the graffitoed brick wall, panting. As he pushed his sweat-dark hair from his glowing face, he noticed them watching him. Roger. He looked up and down the alleyway, adjusted his gloves, stuck his hands in his pockets, and ambled over. 

“Good afternoon, Ma'am,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat—or rather, reaching up with one hand as though expecting to find a hat to tip, and covering his confusion. “Roger Gordon. I don't believe we've met.”

“Oh, please, call me Lilian,” the landlady insisted, sticking out her hand and pumping his fist vigorously. With her free hand, she groped his forearm. Roger shifted and put his left hand behind his back while she prodded him. “You are _so_ strong. Are you a gymnast? A carnie? Don't you have a gym to go to? All the crazy kids and their parr-king, like the whole city is their gym, but you I don't mind one bit.”

Roger flushed. “I had a dream—sometimes—when it's bad I can't lie back down 'till I tire myself out. Sorry for the spectacle.”

“Oh, don't worry yourself. I'm so glad to see you, I'd been so curious—I couldn't decide if Titus here was messing around with one of those Halloween scream generators every afternoon or if Kimmy was experimenting with vigilantism.”

Roger's smile froze, growing slick, pasted-on. Titus pulled at his shirt collar, suddenly sweating, and glanced down at Lillian. “Titus, you never told me our landlady was such a looker. How old are you, anyway? Thirty? Twenty-six?”

“Hah! Precious!” cried Lilian. She clutched Roger's and Titus's shirt sleeves. “You think I don't notice when half your rent starts coming in fifty dollar bills? And the radiators stop banging? And the washing machine stops leaking?” She patted their waists one at a time. “Titus,” she said solemnly, “if you scare this one off, I will be very disappointed in you.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Irked at Lillian's implications, Titus buzzed into work, fuming, spent the next eight hours as the only legitimately terrifying monster-waiter in the entire restaurant, went to bed angry, and the next day hid out at the library where he logged into Ebay and recklessly bid on a limited edition Barbie in a hand-sequined Bob Mackie mermaid gown. The offending implications broke down as follows:

  1. Roger's presence was Titus's responsibility. False. Kimmy had brought him home like a stray cat, or a pooka. Roger belonged to himself. Titus simply found him adorable.

  2. Titus and Kimmy were inferior tenants. False. Titus was a perfectly normal person who had no interest in pipes, wiring, or working for free, and Kimmy had been denied the chance to attend High School home-ec or wood shop. Lillian was bad at maintenance.

  3. Titus would scare Roger off. Hah! Titus had the basic self-awareness to know that his long-term relationships tended to fail because he was emotionally unavailable and secretive. It was part of the package of being Titus Andromedon, single, out, and proud singer-actor from New York City. But it would be the ultimate irony if this minor flaw drove “Roger Gordon” from the building.

  4. Titus and Roger were dating. They weren't dating.




The winsome Mediterranean features of Seafoam Glamour Goddess Barbie twinkled at him as he flicked through the images, and he became disturbed: there was barely visible foxing on the shiny paperboard box she came in, and none of the views showed the hem of her gown from the back. Was there fraying? A tear? A stain? Had a small child taken her from her box and stood her on a filthy carpet?

He forced himself not to chew his fingernails as suspense curdled in his stomach. Would he win the auction? There were twenty-seven minutes left. Had he just paid sixty-two dollars for a flawed Bob Mackie Barbie?

Knuckles rapped on the top of his monitor and he jumped. Roger stood at the other side of the computer desk, long hair disheveled from shoving his gloved hands through it, one arm wrapped around a box of microfiche canisters, biting his plush lower lip. “Say,” he said. “You free next Wednesday at ten?”

“You know I work 'till midnight,” Titus groused.

“No, ten in the a.m.”

“ _Why?_ ” Titus whined. 

Roger blinked. “Sorry, I'll make you breakfast and everything. It's the soonest appointment available, and I really want to do something special for you. Since you've been so kind after I moved in.”

“Just what am I getting out of bed in the small hours for?”

“It's a surprise.” Roger grinned, slick, confident, _trust me._ “ Let me show you a good time for once.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Oh, no,” Titus moaned. “No, no, I _can't_ , Roger, it's too much, I mean, _yes,_ but _no—!_ ”

A hand stroked up his inner thigh toward his crotch. It was a wizened, veiny hand, belonging to a seventy-year-old tailor. “Do you dress to the left or to the right?” the tailor asked, a Yiddish accent escaping past the dozen pins in his mouth.

“Right leg first, then left—no, you mean my _penis._ He's asking about my penis, Roger! I'm not worthy of pants that accommodate which side I hang my penis!”

Sprawled in an armchair, Roger rested his chin on his gloved palm and smirked behind his fingers.

“Left, or right, Mr. Andromedon?”

“Left. It's left. Oh, god!”

“Do you want me to go?” Roger asked.

“No! Don't leave me!”

The fitting continued, inexorable. Titus's body was numbered, circumferenced, catalogued, assessed. He sucked in instinctively as the tape measure encircled his waist, and the tailor cleared his throat sternly. “Relax,” the man rasped. “The suit will fit you, not the other way around.”

“This is too much, Roger. This is how much? A thousand dollars? Two thousand?”

The tailor looked at Roger, raising one bushy eyebrow incredulously.

“I can't think of a single thing this money could have ever done better than get you into a real suit,” said Roger, looking down at his lap. “Not one thing. It's a real spit in the eye to some eyes that need spat in, and after all you've done for me—taking me in—and besides.”

“Besides?”

Roger fell silent. The tailor and his note-taker disappeared, and another tailor and two apprentices arrived with a binder of fabric swatches and a rack of suit coats for Titus to try on for the look. A camel-colored wool-worsted caught his eye. A wine-colored vicuna. Plum silk lining. Titus was no fool, he knew a bespoke suit was a ten or twenty-year investment—what to choose! He'd never had a relationship last more than two! This suit might as well be an arranged marriage! By God, the vicuna was soft, whatever it was. An apprentice slipped a coat around his shoulders and he shrugged into it absently, then looked in the mirror and jumped. Even the sample coat, baggy though it was, made him look like a king. The deep vee of the closure, the way the fine black fabric sucked in light, the weight of it, the warmth and drape of it. He turned to Roger in shock, overwhelmed.

Roger's eyes dragged slowly up from Titus's legs to his shoulders to his face and back down, curling his fingers under his chin to reveal a warm crooked smile. Titus shivered in the two-thousand-dollar-plus wool suit jacket, then rallied and squared his shoulders.

“You smug sneak! We _are_ dating!”

In retrospect, he should have acknowledged that Roger might be attracted to him after he took Roger to the Karaoke bar a month ago and Roger had sung “Heartbeat Song” while gazing into Titus's eyes the entire time.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“If that wasn't dating, what exactly were we doing these past months?” Roger yelled with a smirk as they descended the subway steps on their way home.

“Clubbing. You know, showing you the scene, only you disappear for an hour and I polish the barstools with my rear end.”

Roger's lips thinned. They lined up with the noon rush and cranked through the turnstiles. “Sorry. I got carried away.”

“I wasn't even sure you were gay!”

“I own _two red neckties!_ ”

“What kind of vintage spy code is that supposed to be?”

They boarded the subway to find it standing-room only. Roger grabbed a safety strap and Titus hooked his hand into the same one. They swayed with the motion of the car, chest to chest. The roar of the tunnel blotted out conversations around them. Titus leaned into him, and Roger leaned forward, tentative. It wasn't until they had disembarked and merged onto the sidewalk that Roger resumed their conversation.

“I can't . . . do intimate things,” he said quietly. His usual New Yawky accent was subdued. “You shouldn't be steady with me. I'm good for a little necking and petting, but that's all.”

Titus gave him a flat look. “Why, because of the disgusting burns and tattoos on your left arm?” He leaned in. “Do I look like I have a lot of friends in Neo-Nazi domestic terror groups?”

Roger pulled away, eyes wide, face blank.

Titus took his hand slowly—the right hand, the one he sometimes took the glove off of. “I'm flamboyant, not stupid. Don't be so scared, you think my daddy was called 'Mr. Andromedon'? People come to New York to start over _all the time._ You're not special. You're not even all that interesting.”

Roger's expression warmed, and he made a mock scowl. “Oh, I'm not, am I?”

“Brooding brunet white boy on the run from his tragic past? You're a dime a dozen. I've _dated_ a dozen.”

“So I'm just your type.” Smug.

Titus thought back to his middle school history report. “Boy, you don't know the half of it.”

  
  


* * *

 

  
  


“Oh, my, god,” Titus said slowly as Roger removed his shirt for the first time. They were sitting side-by-side on Titus's bed. “That is a tragedy.” He slowly picked up Roger's left wrist and rotated it gently. “A penis with a blue ribbon? Is this even supposed to be your penis, I hope not if you expect me to put my mouth on it. A Fleur de Lis? You ever crack a history book, white boy?” He kissed Roger's knuckles and Roger watched him, still, spellbound. Titus worked his way slowly toward his elbow. “Oh, my god. 'My cock's the only thing that ever made your momma cum.' With the barbed wire. Is this blob the soap from Fight Club?” He mouthed his way up toward Roger's shoulder, dry kisses, as Roger held his arm utterly still. “It looks like a bad strawberry cheesecake, I hope it was cheap. And I see nobody told you stars are the hallmark of the pedestrian mind.” He stroked the knotted skin at his back and chest. “The _Yankees_ logo?”

Roger jerked. “No way.”

“My mistake, this is a tacky faux-tribal coverup.”

Roger closed his eyes and leaned into Titus's hand. “I made a lot of bad decisions,” he breathed. “I was real stupid when I was younger. Sniffed coke 'till I couldn't remember my own name.”

“Thought that was the head injury.”

“That, too. I hurt people. Ran with a real bad gang, did whatever the big man said.”

“But you're going straight, now. So strong, and gorgeous, and good. You're gonna keep going and never look back. Cause if you want to be seen with Titus Andromedon, you've got to be respectable.”

“Kiss me, sweet-talker.”

And Titus did.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Heartbeat Song_ , Kelly Clarkson.  
> "This is my heartbeat song and I'm gonna play it  
> Been so long I forgot how to turn it up up up up all night long  
> Oh up up all night long
> 
> "You, where the hell did you come from?  
> You're a different, different kind of fun  
> And I'm so used to feeling numb  
> Now, I got pins and needles on my tongue  
> Anticipating what's to come  
> Like a finger on a loaded gun
> 
> "I can feel it rising  
> Temperature inside me  
> Haven't felt it for a lifetime..."
> 
> Bob Mackie is a fashion designer who also collaborates with Mattel to create the most useless Barbie dolls ever made. They come sewn into their exquisite little ballgowns. My grandmother gave me a Goddess Of The Sun Barbie, who looked and dressed very much like her. Image-search Bob Mackie Barbie and you will understand my grandmother, and what Titus is bidding on.
> 
> In early 20th century gay culture, a red necktie was used to subtly indicate that the wearer was interested in homosexual acts. Sources seem to agree that at the time, homosexuality was thought to be not an identity or an inborn trait, but a behavior, like stamp collecting or alcoholism.
> 
> A bespoke suit seems to run $1500 and up from what I can find online; of course there is never an upper limit on price. I imagined Bucky splurging upwards of $8000 on Titus.
> 
> The Fleur De Lis showed up on a list of offensive tattoos I used for inspiration; it was associated with a slave-trading company in Louisiana.


	5. Kimmy Kisses A Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kimmy and Roger watch a movie.  
> Titus has an unwitting brush with death.  
> Dong takes Kimmy to a cocktail party for free.

All the world's injustice did not fall away simply because the men who called themselves Titus Andromedon and Roger Gordon were now romantically engaged. It simply felt a little more distant. The building was still infested with silverfish. Titus was still underemployed, Roger still cut a paper-thin margin between taking home his bike-messenging salary and spending it all on bicycle repair, Kimmy still occasionally sleepwalked around the kitchen clutching Titus's knives. Their difficulties seemed surmountable; if insurmountable, avoidable; if inevitable, philosophical.

Early on, Titus inquired delicately about Roger's disease status, and Roger turned the unfortunate shade of green that Titus read as, “I don't know and I don't want to find out.” So they pursued very safe sex and sex-adjacent activities. It was helpful that Roger viewed condoms as both a novelty and a turn-on. Roger also carried an enormous array of what he and Titus liked to call “weird religious hangups.” For example, Roger could not maintain arousal in bare feet, or in shoes, but only if he was wearing fuzzy socks. Likewise, he could not maintain arousal if the lights were off, if Titus was partially dressed, if the lights were all the way on, if the blinds were all the way closed, if the apartment building was too quiet, or if there were jackhammers in the distance. “I'm very sexually repressed,” he would say, lying on Titus's bed in his favorite socks and peeking coyly out from under his favorite fleece throw blanket. “It's the root of all my neuroses.”

When the sex wasn't on, they would cuddle and watch bootlegged Broadway musicals on VHS. Roger genuinely loved Broadway musicals. Titus often wondered what bhodisatva he had unwittingly helped who had sent him this miraculous man.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Roger quit his bike messenger job, and suddenly he was spending many hours during the day on the couch in the apartment, filling out more job applications and reading library books about PTSD and human sexuality and terrible science fiction novels. After a few weeks when he started biting his nails over making the rent—Titus unilaterally bumped his share down to an even third—he got an under-the-table position as a dishwasher at a diner. This way, he went right from the nightclub which closed at three in the morning to the diner which opened at four-thirty. He saw Titus and Kimmy on days off and early in the evening if Titus didn't have to work yet or Mrs. Voorhees hadn't kept Kimmy busy past seven.

One of these rare evenings, Kimmy brought home a James Bond movie from the library on VHS. Roger made popcorn out of whole corn kernels in his stock pot, and they dragged out the TV and VCR and huddled comfortably on the couch, all three of them, to watch _Moonraker_. Kimmy _oohed_ at the explosions, giggled at the jokes. Titus groaned at the campy bits. Roger scoffed at Roger Moore's trigger discipline, at the car chases, at the piloting, and how fake the explosions looked. Then the big henchman Jaws stepped onto the screen and grinned around metal teeth, and Roger sat up like he'd been shocked.

After that, Roger watched the film mainly for Jaws. “Show some hustle, it ain't no Sunday promenade,” he muttered. Later, as Jaws began to tear apart an armored car with his bare hands like it was tinfoil and silk, “The windshield! The god—darn windshield, what, afraid of some bloody knuckles?” “Quit playing with 'em and tip over the damn car!” Kimmy started rubbing his back now and then as the movie went on. “You straighten your goddamn tie, you flash bastard,” he sobbed. “Straighten that goddamn tie.” And then he bolted from the apartment to go climb up and down the fire escape.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“That was my job,” he said out of the blue as he served up Kimmy a steaming bowl of gray-green chicken-leek-and-potato sludge. “That guy with the teeth. That was my job.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Roger and Titus found a window between when Roger trudged home stinking of fry oil and when Titus strutted out in his werewolf getup to work the dinner shift, when they would fool around for a half hour or so and then Roger would catch his daily catnap on Titus's bed. This was possible four or five days a week. Roger turned out to sleep pretty soundly when he felt safe enough, so Titus would take his time dusting his barbie dolls, reorganizing his closet, posing for headshots in the mirror, or just lying beside him, staring. It was a peaceful time that Titus and Roger looked forward to. Sometimes Roger had screaming nightmares, but so did Kimmy, and Titus had been living with Kimmy for months without the compensation of tragic brunet white boy sex.

The nightmares were almost routine. When Roger sleep-talked, it was usually not in English. If he woke himself up, he and Titus would cuddle and put on _The Wizard of Oz._ Usually he didn't. He'd give a blood-curdling scream and arch his back off the mattress like he was possessed, then go limp and drop back into a sound sleep. 

One afternoon was different, a difference that did not alarm Titus enough to mention it, though it should have. Roger went from stillness to rolling his head from side to side, twitching, as Titus watched across the room. He sat up abruptly, said something foreign, and stared straight ahead for a full minute.

“Baby?” Titus asked, rising from his vanity. “You alright?”

Roger's eyes flicked to him, and Titus recoiled. They looked dead. Roger looked dead. He looked like something else, something that didn't know Titus, didn't know where it was, didn't know to ask. Titus waved his hand slowly in front of Roger's face, and Roger stared straight ahead, dull. Titus reached toward him, and now Roger tracked his hand, something like fear, like fear that was worn down to an unrecognizable stump, showed in the set of his mouth. Titus pulled his hand back. “You with me, soldier boy?” he asked, his voice trembling.

Roger met his eyes. Dead blue-gray eyes. Titus shuddered.

“How about you try to go back to sleep,” Titus said. He lifted up the blanket which had fallen around Roger's waist. “You're okay. Sleep.”

Roger lay down and closed his eyes, and Titus tucked him in very carefully.

When he saw Roger next, he seemed normal. Well, Titus had never expected Roger Gordon to be perfectly sane.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Dong's third date idea came, like the second, when he was idling with his hands at his sides waiting for his customers to stop jabbering and give him his tip.

They were young men in sharp but sweat-stained suits, lounging in a cubicle on the 18th floor of a building whose security guards frisked Dong at every delivery. “Hey, Ted, what's that tuxedo place you used for New Years?”

“It's cocktail hour, you don't wear a fuckin' tuxedo,” growled Ted, a pallid blond man, shiny and rounded from months of late nights in the office eating Chinese takeout in front of the computer. “Christ, I gotta hold your dick while you piss.”

“It's a simple question, Ted.” The other man pawed idly at his wallet, blinked hard, and shook his head as though to rattle his eyeballs awake. “Dude, did I tip you yet?”

“You don't _ask_ the delivery boy whether or not you tipped him!” Ted bawled. He stabbed at his keyboard, sending rows of cells dancing in an endless spreadsheet.

“You gotta unwind, or you might lose us another account,” Non-Ted muttered. “Drink some free cocktails, get lucky, get that stick pried out.”

Ted tore a flyer down from a corkboard on the cubicle wall, balled it up, and beaned Non-Ted in the head with it. “Write me up for assault,” Ted said.

As though on a two-second delay, Non-Ted reached one hand up and rubbed his ear where the paper ball had hit. “Here,” he said to Dong, handing him a five dollar bill. “Call it charity.” He swayed over to the neighboring cubicle and Dong heard the rattle of a pill bottle.

“Hey, save me one'a those,” Ted yelled. “This fuckin' job.”

Dong swept the paper ball out of sight with his foot, scooped it up as he left, and unfolded it in the elevator.

It was a party coming up in four days. Each guest got one free cocktail.

Well, actually it was a business conference, but Ted or Non-Ted had helpfully circled “Cocktail Social” on the second day and added a clumsy drawing of a martini glass and a pair of breasts next to it.

 

* * *

 

 

They arrived by bicycle again—Dong in the polo and kakhis he kept for job interviews, Kimmy in her birthday dress, stain and all, carrying as a purse one of Roger's ammunition satchels bedazzled with brightly colored shards of crushed Christmas ornaments gathered after Jacqueline had thrown them at her ex-husband while moving out. In the lobby, Kimmy handed Dong a broken analog camera (ten dollars) and they split up. The lobby was busy tonight; lobby security wasn't talking to anyone, just watching for anyone who looked like they were just hanging around to keep warm. The party was on floor 10, and Dong got past the nametag table by faking poor English and waving an employment contract he'd mocked up on a library computer ahead of time. He faked taking a picture of the man at the admissions table and palmed an ID badge while the man blinked in anticipation of the flash.

Kimmy detoured to the 10th floor bathroom. At the sink, she spooled off a double handful of paper towels and wet down the stain on the butt of her pink dress. Then she pulled a thrift-store champagne flute from her satchel and filled it with ginger ale.

She took a deep breath in the mirror, practiced sipping with her pinkie out, a turn and a toss of her head. “Come on, Kimmy,” she cajoled. “What would Jacqueline do?”

  
  


* * *

 

 

 

Across the conference room, Dong looked up from “photographing” a young black man who talked like a constipated newscaster from Indiana.

“Richard! Richard!” A voice shrilled from the entrance. The many Dicks in the room also turned to look.

Kimmy hobbled right past the front desk, swiping uselessly at the wet spot on her dress with one hand, a champagne flute of sprite in the other, and her cell phone clamped between her shoulder and her ear.

“Frick! Frick! Fricketyfrick!” She hissed as she side-stepped the concerned security guards. With an emphatic “Frick!” she chucked the paper towels in a trash bin and wove away into the crowd.

“Your card, so I can send pictures to you?” Dong asked. The young man handed him a business card and a tip. Dong stuffed them into his back pocket with the rest of the business cards he'd collected.

The Dicks who'd looked up at Kimmy's cry relaxed when she singled out none of them. She put away her cell phone and stacked up a paper plate with meatballs, crab cakes, and little baby corn ears. A few yards away, a young blond man was also munching on crab cakes. She approached him from behind.

“Holy Shnikeys, these things are so good!” she exclaimed when she reached his elbow. He swallowed hard and looked around for something to wipe his hands on. “Smitherson. Kimmy Smitherson. I didn't see you at the conference, were you in the back at the thing?”

“No, I was in the front,” he said, a little defensive. “Leveraged acquisitions and restructuring is my forté. Wouldn't miss it if the FTC was camped out there in a van.”

“Leverage is my favorite!” Kimmy gushed. “You can open doors and lift heavy loads! No matter how strong the latch is, you can pry the whole doorway apart if you have enough leverage!”

“Yeah, I never expected to be making a hundred thousand dollars on top of a two-hundred base by age twenty-nine,” the blond man said. “Talk about opening doors. I been to Finance Meets Fashion. The type of girl I can take home these days...and you wanna talk respect, you should come with me in my Mas. Heads turn, niggas get whiplash, yo.”

“Zoom-zoom,” Kimmy said, recalling an ancient Mazda commercial. “So what's your secret?”

“How do I hunt down primo acquisitional opportunities in this time of economic contraction and corporate cowardice?” He took Kimmy by her bare upper arm and ushered her behind a cardboard cutout of Warren Buffett. “The motherfucking Insight scandal.”

Kimmy widened her eyes and pursed her lips, and he elaborated.

“Lotta these execs who are going down, felonies, grand jury indictments, all that shit, their companies are still fundamentally sound. They can't indict a factory for treason. And if the corporation's based out of a country that's less sensitive about HYDRA, their stock still takes a hit but operations don't even slack. I'm bullish on HYDRA. But who wants to invest in a HYDRA fund? Nobody, not even HYDRA money. So what my outfit does, we do a little randomized distribution chain through the Caimans on the input end, and we make a product that's partial shares of the tainted companies tranched in with, like, green investment shit. My institution's clients are gagging for more. And whenever the firms actually fold, we got the collateral to leverage a buy-out. Buy the company, clean it up, fire anybody whose third cousin twice removed turned up in the Insight files, restructure whatever's left, and sell the clean company back to some expat HYDRA bigshot who by this time is gagging for it, pays us ten times its real worth just to get it back in the fold. Hey, you got a card, want me to drop your name in the pot next hiring cycle?”

Kimmy did not have a card. Mock business cards would have cost fifteen dollars. If they could afford fake business cards _and_ a prop camera, they would have just had their date at a food truck. “Not now, but where do you work so I can stick it in the ol' Rolodex?”

“Deckler and—hey, are you a second-year analyst? You got that look like you just escaped a windowless cube, kinda haggard and translucent. That makes me your knight in shining armor, huh. I tell ya, the hours in private equity are So. Much. Better. I got to swing by Aspen for six hours on Christmas. Some weeks I do less than ninety hours, and I haven't gone home after midnight all month—I could still do it, though.” He drummed his chest with the hand not holding his crab cakes. “No! Sleep! Till! Brooklyn!”

“Omigod, Karen!” A pale young woman squealed in Kimmy's ear. Kimmy startled and almost hit her with her meatballs. All her food went flying and a baby corn pegged the young man in the forehead.

Kimmy struggled not to knee the young woman in the groin, like Roger had taught her, as she was firmly and unexpectedly hugged. “Karen, it’s been so long! We have _got_ to catch up! Come on!” the woman exclaimed, practically hauling Kimmy away.

“Wait, Karen—” the young man protested.

“What was your name?” asked Kimmy over her shoulder.

“Phil Basset—”

“Phil Basset. I’ll call you!” And Kimmy let herself be hauled.

The other woman towed her through the mingling crowd toward a shoe-shining station on the opposite end of the conference room. “Sorry,” she said. “Did I read that right? You looked like you don’t need anymore overbearing men in your face, and that guy’s a total Red Pill.”

“Yeah, I just escaped a year in the analyst dungeon,” Kimmy agreed, writing “Phil Basset—bull for Hydra” on a napkin.

“Omigod,” the woman practically sobbed. “That is _exactly_ it. It’s like my—I know I’m not supposed to talk about it—like my soul shriveled up and died. I don’t know who I am anymore. My fingernails are all flaky so I have to wear acrylics, see?” She held up thick red artificial nails. “I gained twenty pounds. Everything _hurts_. I went home to see my sister and I almost died of RedBull withdrawal. The whole time I was calculating how much my niece would cost over her lifetime and I had to stop myself before I offered to abandon her at a hospital.” She gripped Kimmy by the upper arms, eyes wild. “This is what Elves felt while Morgoth was turning them into Orcs.”

Kimmy nodded sympathetically.

“But I’m making more money than all my step-parents combined,” she continued. “I can’t stop now! I don’t know how to live on less than six figures!”

Kimmy patted her on the back and nodded some more. Her friend Jacqueline had panic attacks at the thought of living on a million dollars a year, and less than a tenth of that must be even scarier. But Kimmy, Dong, Titus, and Roger were all too poor to afford panic attacks.

“But this is good,” the young woman continued. “I got a buyer on a nine-million dollar package of plastic surgery debt, I think we’ll get two cents on the dollar for it, which is like ten percent over the going rate, it’s insane. Buyer’s trying to set up a hedge fund with consumer debt, but between you and me I think he’s a sucker. He wants to wrangle debt collectors and gangsters ‘cause he thought his weed dealer was the coolest guy at college—half of it’s post-oncologic-surgery plastic surgery, these people are already wiped out, he’ll never cover his costs.”

“Of course!” Kimmy laughed a Jacqueline _Hah! Hah-hah-hah_ , with one wrist raised and her head thrown back. “What a dummy. Who is it?”

The woman shifted abruptly, leaning away with a slitted, cagey look. “Who do you work for, again?”

Both Roger and Titus had offered the same response to this crisis, which Kimmy followed with conviction. “How! Dare! You suggest! That I am anything but a licensed legitimate professional distress-investing adult woman!” she gasped in her Jacqueline voice. “Who do _you_ work for?”

“G-Goldman-Sachs,” the woman squeaked.

“I _thought_ so,” Kimmy sniffed, and turned away with her nose in the air. At a safe distance, she wrote “Goldman Sacks—sells hospital bills” on her napkin.

 

* * *

 

 

Dong had worked his way around the room, taking “complimentary business portraits” until he ended up at the cardboard cutout of Warren Buffett where pickings picked up sharply, because the attendees figured out that they could give the cut-out a side-hug and if the image quality was low enough and the lighting was soft they could frame the resulting picture for their desks to prove they had friends in high places. Dong encouraged this behavior, calling out, “Pictures with Buffett!” as he corralled the line between shots. He set out a dropped stationery pad from one of the swag tables on a convenient flower stand, and had everyone write their names and contact information for him.

Nobody noticed that he never had to reload his camera.

Kimmy turned up in the line about an hour in. She hugged Warren Buffett, who was starting to look a little foxed at the edges, and handed Dong a wad of cocktail napkins. She nodded her head toward the bar before she left again.

The line had slowed by this time, and in a break between customers, Dong stuffed his collection of business cards and his stationery pad into his pockets and abandoned his prop camera behind an artificial ficus. He slipped on a pair of glasses lifted from a donation bin outside a homeless shelter and approached the bar, yelling dialogue from the Vietnamese dub of _Friends_ as he held a children's makeup case made to look like an IPhone to his ear. He made his way to the bar, jabbed his finger randomly at a menu of three cocktails, and received a stamp on his hand and a “Dividends On The Beach” in a plastic goblet. He joined Kimmy, who had her own goblet and stamp, by the exit near the bathrooms. Anyone watching would suspect they had left to make out in a dark corner, which, Dong hoped, would be correct.

They ducked into a stairwell where they sipped their cocktails and laid out Dong's two-hundred names and business cards and Kimmy's twelve cocktail napkins and grouped them by employer.

“These people are making millions of dollars buying and selling other people's bad luck,” Kimmy said.

Dong surveyed their amassed data with pride. “What do we do?”

“We should tell the police!” Kimmy decided.

“Should we write an after-action report?” Dong fumbled for Roger's disjointed explanations of traditional American date activities. “To help their analysis?”

Kimmy nodded. “We should do it together. And we could get credit on it for GED class!”

“Good!” Dong exclaimed. He picked up his cocktail and took a deep swig that danced on his tongue like electric Starbursts. “Kimmy,” he said gravely. “We are a good team.”

She looked up from the spread of names, her eyes dilated in the dim light of the stairwell.

“You are joyful and hard-working and kind. And smart. We are already good friends.”

“This is our third practice-date,” Kimmy said, wrapping her arms around her knees.

Dong nodded, relieved that Kimmy had been counting along with him. “I have never met another woman I like as much as you,” Dong said, “but America is full of weirdos. If you want to stop, someday I will find another best girl. But I want to go steady with you, if you'll have me.”

“I don't want you to find another girl,” Kimmy said vehemently. She screwed up her face. “Kiss me.”

“We are going steady now? Am I your best guy?” Dong asked, heart racing.

“Just kiss me!” Kimmy exclaimed, eyes still shut and cheeks flushed.

Dong leaned in. He swished out his mouth with one last swig of his cocktail, steadied one hand beneath her chin, and slowly, slowly sank toward her soft lips, gentle but certain like a freight-liner coming in to dock, like the crescent moon rising over the glittering horizon of the open sea, like a load of steel beams coming to rest on the scaffold of an ever-rising skyscraper. She tasted like cherries and barrel-aged cognac.

Then Dong heard a crack and found himself tumbling down the stairs. Kimmy bolted down after him, horrified, and helped him up. His eyebrow was bleeding. She'd hit him with her elbow.

“I didn't mean to do that! I'm so sorry, I don't know what happened!” Kimmy cried.

Dong shut one eye, then the other, trying to get a single image. The two Kimmys looked very sorry. “Did I scare you?” Dong asked, slowly, the English needing several circuits 'round his brain to reach his mouth.

“No!” Kimmy protested. “Me? Scared? Of a kiss? That's like being scared of Velcro. Or clowns! You can't eat at McDonalds if you're scared of clowns!”

“Kimmy,” Dong said, rising and steadying himself against the wall. “It is OK. We should try again. But different.” He wiped his eyebrow on his sleeve, tenderly. They needed to get to it and go their separate ways soon before the goose-egg got obvious. He was thankful for the dim light of the stairwell.

“What if I kiss you?” Kimmy asked, hesitant.

“Yes, good,” Dong got out, but then Kimmy rushed him, pinned him against the wall with her hips, grabbed his wrists in one hand and his hair with the other. She avoided giving him a second concussion, but she was not gentle. His wrists hurt where she squeezed them together. She leaned in, mouth open, cherries and cognac, cherries and cognac all over his lips and his chin and a little on his nose.

“Kimmy, stop, I don't like it,” Dong interrupted. Was this an American custom? A regional thing?

Kimmy released his mouth but not her grip. “Am I doing it wrong?”

“I don't know,” Dong said. “Maybe it's me.”

“Maybe I _am_ doing it wrong,” Kimmy said, forlorn. “Maybe I don't know how to kiss at all.”

“We can practice,” Dong said, tugging his wrists free and peeling her fingers from his hair. “Like you helped my English and I helped your math.”

“Maybe we should just go all the way,” Kimmy sighed, sitting heavily on the stairs.

“ _No,_ ” Dong said firmly, sixty-percent certain of that colloquialism.

Kimmy sniffled. Dong regretted his tone but it was only self-defense.

“Can I hug you?” he asked. They had in the past hugged without injury.

“Half a hug,” Kimmy said miserably, after a pause.

Dong sank down beside her and wrapped one arm around her shoulders. She hugged his waist in return, and he was grateful—his head was really starting to hurt. “We can figure it out,” Dong reassured her. “No hurry.”

“Thanks,” Kimmy mumbled into his belly button. “I guess this makes you officially my best guy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I research horrifying stuff for my art. Like finance, and what happens to consumer debt after it gets written off. Apparently finance people are greasy systematically sleep-deprived and overworked money-hounds hopped up on pills and their own egoes, chasing bonuses at the risk of their entire firms.
> 
> Canonically, Kimmy has a phobia of velcro. She also has PTSD to the degree that she brains Dong in the head with a lamp when he attempts to kiss her. Previously, when she attempted to kiss Logan Beekman, she tackled him to her bed and pinned his wrists first. In Season 2 she goes to therapy.
> 
> Jaws is considered by many to be the greatest Bond henchman of all time, and a fan favorite. He has metal teeth. He chews through a gondola cable trying to kill James Bond. It is gloriously stupid. The Winter Soldier is basically an heirloom henchman.
> 
> With the trigger words, knowing how much we don't know about the brain, I think it's more-or-less inevitable that Bucky would eventually slip into the murderous yet highly suggestible mindset induced by them, only for no reason. Just, brain-fart, violent fugue. Or a bad dream.


	6. Titus And Roger Take A Walk

When it was time for Titus to return to the tailors for the first fitting of his bespoke suit, Roger could not go with him, busy washing dishes until noon. They slipped the superb black wool worsted over his shoulders, still roughly basted together with thick white thread, and had him sit, stand, lean forward and back, cross his arms. Titus clutched his hands before him as though crooning into a microphone. He glanced in a mirror, and Count Basie smoldered back at him. It was too much, and he had to sit down.

He wished he could have shared the sight with Roger. He would take home the final fitting in another month, and he would show him then.

He was really going to own a multiple-thousand-dollar bespoke suit. He would audition in it. He would perform in it. He could even get re-married in it, and that thought did not terrify him as it once had, because a life partner was not a lifetime of performance and false bravado in one's own home, a life partner was falling asleep in the same bed after a long day at work, watching the same fuzzy VHS tapes over and over, making do while making allowances for budget and exhaustion, facing an uncertain future hand-in-hand. Was Roger perfect? No. Was he safe to live with? Probably safer than Kimmy. Was Roger real?

Titus favored the notion of “real” from _The Velveteen Rabbit_ : that “real” was something you became over time, a process in your soul and in bonds and relationships, and sometimes a little push from a kindly fairy. Titus didn't consider himself all that kindly, but he'd been certainly pushing. What he did know, was that the real person behind Roger Gordon was a good person that he was not sorry to spend time with. Hadn't Roger given him enough? A suit. Rent savings. A functional radiator. Gentle sex couched in floridly vanilla roleplay. Roger's work schedule was exhausting him, left him worn and hollow-eyed, but there was a light in him that grew brighter and brighter each day: the misery and delight of being desperately poor and desperately in love. Titus wanted to hope that that light was burning for him.

He blabbered a bit for the tailors, pointed out a half-dozen areas of contention but did not actually request that they change them (he wanted his point of view known, he didn't want to ruin anything), and took the subway home. He let himself into the apartment and opened his bedroom door softly. Roger's socked feet stuck out from under the blankets. The door shut with a click.

“Steve,” Roger said, a pleased groan, then looked up and froze.

It wasn't as though Titus only bedded virgins. He pursed his lips and waited: there were two ways this could go.

“Titus,” Roger said in the same tone, his eyes lazily hooded, his smile artificially inviting. 

Titus sat down and took his shoes off. “Baby, let's just nap today, I was up late last night.”

Roger hesitantly curled up beside him, and his breathing slowed. But he did not sleep. The lack of screaming was a bit of a clue.

  
  


* * *

  
  


This was not Titus's first tragic past lovestory rodeo. He had a technique. It involved keeping his trap shut. Maybe it was a fluke. A man was entitled to his privacy.

He passive-aggressively left a mint on Roger's favorite pillow after making the bed.

For his part, Roger never mentioned the name “Steve” again, and kept trying to seduce him, only to lie back down with a resigned expression when Titus shrugged him off. Once he tried to invite Titus out for a picnic (stolen bottle of wine and a roasted chicken) on top of the library (definitely illegal). Titus declined citing his fear of heights, which was only slightly exaggerated. Roger stopped having nightmares in bed because he stopped sleeping in bed; he just lay there holding perfectly still for hours. Eventually it got a little pitiful, his eyes hollow, his balance off, his expression vacant.

Titus was not the one being difficult, here.

Things came to a head when Titus woke from a sound sleep to a violent pounding on their apartment door, and then Kimmy yelling from the living room to wake up.

He got up, put his slippers on, shuffled out. Kimmy had the lights on and was clutching their baseball bat, he didn't see what she needed him up for. “Someone's at the door,” she hissed, which, yes, he'd gathered. He squared his shoulders and faced the door with Kimmy, ready to, he didn't know, slam the door on the bad guy's toes.

Kimmy opened the door, revealing a huge, red-faced, comic-book-jawed white guy with a crew cut and stubble—not flattering stubble, nasty stubble, with pimples. He was wearing a red Adidas tracksuit. Under his arm was Roger,wearing his usual long sleeves and gloves under a tight black shirt with SECURITY printed on the chest, staring like a deer in the headlights.

“This bro's fucked up,” the big guy said in a thick accent. He pointed at Kimmy. “Girlfriend?”

Kimmy jerked her thumb at Titus. “He's your man. Friend.”

The scary man shoved Roger through the door, and he staggered against Titus, banging him in the shoulder with his left arm. Roger mumbled something in a foreign language and the other white guy gave him a pitying look. “Have him sleep. In morning. Tell him, pay cut tonight. But boss says, we cool if it don't happen again.”

Then the man turned away and slammed the door.

Roger was heavy. Titus eased him onto the couch. He sank awkwardly down, eyes darting here and there without recognition, then landed on Titus. He frowned.

“Babe?” Titus asked.

Roger started speaking French at him.

“English, Baby, take your time.”

Kimmy leaned in. “Did they get you? Did someone slip you something? Did they hack your brain again?”

“I'm an American!” Roger gasped. “Help me, I'm an American! I think—don't let them take me, I'm an American, I swear! I swear!” He clutched at Titus's pajamas with his disturbingly strong grip and sobbed. 

“It's a dream, Baby, you're safe.”

“But what if he's right?” Kimmy asked. 

“Kimspiracy Theory, he's babbling, he's barely awake. Babe, we've got you. You're safe. I believe you, you're an American. Kimmy here's gonna protect you while you sleep, right, Kimmy?”

Kimmy sat on the coffee table clutching the bat. “I'll pound their skulls in.”

Roger let go of Titus and stroked Kimmy's hair, said something in another language neither of them knew.

“They won't get you back,” Kimmy said. “I'll call the Avengers if anybody else shows up.”

Titus spread a crochet throw blanket over Roger's legs, and Roger finally eased back against the cushions, jerking and tossing his head. Titus sighed, and padded back to his bedroom.

“Titus?” Kimmy asked incredulously.

“You can handle it, Batgirl,” he said, and went back to bed.

  
  


* * *

 

  
Roger managed to peel himself off the couch and head off to the diner before dawn, somehow, but when he returned in the early afternoon, grinning like a vintage advertisement for Brylcreem under the purple rings around his eyes, Titus was ready for him. “Something you'd like to get off your chest?” he asked, sitting primly at the kitchen table.

Roger smiled at Titus the way he smiled at Lillian, at his hairdresser, at the gorgeous athletic people he used to schmooze back when he'd had time and money for clubbing. Titus could either be furious or pity him, and he took pity on him. “I get it,” Titus said. “You're still hung up on your ex.”

Roger slumped with relief. The smile dropped off his face and he just looked waxy. He joined Titus at the table, leaning heavily on his elbows. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I've been around a few years,” Titus said primly, “and I don't give my heart away as easily as I used to. I've learned things. I've learned I deserve a man who can be honest with me about whether he can give me his heart back or not.”

“I'm sorry,” Roger repeated. “I . . . I knew there was someone, once. But I didn't . . . they cut it out of me. Until I was making love to you, I didn't understand what it meant to love someone. I didn't know the old feeling would—could grow back.”

Titus looked away, up at the ceiling. “If you can't let go of your ex—”

“I'll leave.”

“I was going to say we'll just have to be fuckbuddies. If you want to.”

“Aw, there's a word for it and everything.” Roger yawned. “Twenty-fifteen sure is grand.”

“Go to bed, soldier boy, I'll tuck you in. But if I get a steady man, you go back out to the couch.”

“Sure thing. Buddy.”

Roger took his boots off and fell into bed. Titus reorganized his closet. Twenty minutes later Roger slept through a horrible scream and then started whimpering in foreign languages—business as usual. Titus slumped in his favorite chair and blinked heavily at the ceiling, stuffing down his disappointment. He knew several Japanese folk songs about kitsune brides, and he hummed one, then got up and dug the box of discarded clothing from his exes out of his closet. It was heavy; he had a lot of exes.

This time it was really, really not Titus's fault.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A scream from inside the bedroom, and a minute later, Roger knocked at the doorframe and peeked out, spotting Titus dusting the valances. He cleared his throat hesitantly. “Do fuckbuddies watch  _Kinky Boots_ together?”

Titus let his duster droop in a gesture of disgust. “I know our terminology gets complicated. But I will _always_ be up for _Kinky Boots._ ”

Roger gave him a shy smile, and Titus flounced over to join him, leaving the duster on a knicknack shelf.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“A drugstore? You drag me all the way out to Brooklyn to see a drugstore?”

“I'll buy you a coffee,” Roger said, unrepentant. It was two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, cold and threatening to drizzle. Roger stood comfortable in his canvas chore coat, gloved hands in his pockets. Titus' feet were sore and he shivered in his purple cardigan.

It was an independent drugstore, the kind that sold prescriptions, stationary, souvenirs, candy, eggs, and milk, slightly gussied-up for the hipsters with signs for free Wi-Fi and vape refills in the window. The front wall was eighty percent glass brick, with two stories of regular brick up top for apartments.

“I read when a, a gay bar shuts down, there's no record it was ever there except the people who remember it,” Roger said, and Titus forgot his pinching shoes.

“Tell me more,” he said, looking the architectural abortion up and down with new interest.

“Well, back when I lived around here, before my accident, this was a jumpin' little dive called McKinneys,” Roger said. “Upstairs used to be the dancehall. The drinks were weak and it mighta been a mob outfit, but they got acts in from all over the city, patrons too. Harlem's right across the bridge. The dance pros came here to blow off steam and swap new moves. Great place to take a gal for a little adventure if she wasn't too religious.” He gave Titus a calculated, sideways glance. “Great place to take a gal if she wanted an adventure on her own.

“So there I am, watching . . . watching this cute blonde twostepping with a distinguished lady in a suit and monocle, and the saxophone player finishes his set, sits down at the bar and buys me a drink. Tall, long fingers, elbows go everywhere when he talks. He got me a whiskey, the real stuff. He was sweating from being under the lights all evening, and he had his collar undone. I look at him, I wave at my date, she waves back. And I follow him out into the alley, and that's the first time I ever traded suck jobs with another man.”

Roger's voice was composed, but his face was flushed. “Changed your life forever?” Titus asked.

Roger's mouth worked for a moment and his lips flattened. “That's complicated.” He shuffled his feet. “I liked it.”

The awning over the front of the drugstore read “Since 1957.” “Careful, young man, you're showing your age,” Titus said.

“I got my head caved in, I can't help what I remember,” Roger shrugged. “Place closed down that year. Vice raids, the crowd got scared. But 'till then it was good. A fella could neck in the corner with whoever would have him without looking over his shoulder. And the old crowd had some stories from before the Crash when things were real liberated. Pansy balls. All-male burlesques. Whole clubs packed with nothing but women. When the cops started looking into it, it went underground more, to Harlem, to mixed-race clubs, and mob joints like this one. But people were people. They did the same things, just more careful.”

“Did you meet any stars?”

Roger snorted. “My memory's not that good. I think—a girl sang? She could turn a song backwards and inside out and it came out brand new.” He hummed a bit and murmured, “ _Oh, the devil's gonna get you, sure as you're born to die._ She had a boy's name. Billy. Billy Christmas?”

Titus felt his jaw drop. He squeaked and covered his face with one hand, then the other. “Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday walked through these doors with her own little feet?”

“I take it she's a high-roller these days?” 

Titus frowned. “She, uh.” Roger's face fell before he could get another word out, and Titus couldn't bear to watch, turned away. “She's a legend,” he said, his voice cracking.

Roger nodded tightly.

“Well, now we have to go in,” Titus continued. “I want to stand where she stood. And I want to watch you try to order coffee in a drugstore.”

“I'll get you _something_. And then I'll show you the second place I ever traded suckjobs with another man,” Roger said, and held the door for him as they walked under the jingling doorbell.

Roger ended up buying a pack of Twinkies to split. Then Titus stood in the First Aid aisle, trying to un-see the signage and dim the fluorescent lights, until he could picture a wood-paneled space hopping with hepcats and brassy dames, twirling, careless of race or sex, to the smooth pipes of a young Billie Holiday stretching her wings.

“ _It's that ole devil called love game,_ ” Titus crooned to the shelves of hard candy and greeting cards, “ _gets_ _behind me and keeps giving me that shock again. Put a ring in my eyes, tears in my dreams . . . and rocks in my heart._ ”

Out the corner of his eye, he saw Roger smiling. “ _It's that sly ole sun of a gun again—he keeps telling me that I'm the lucky one again. But I still have that ring, still have those tears . . ._ ” He sang it through, for the imagined audience, for his friendly ex, for the moustachioed white boys crowding around with their Iphones raised high, for Miss Holiday herself, broadening the tune with trills and flourishes, and finishing—there was a tear in his eye, his voice was about to crack—finishing on a high, operatic tremolo.

He wiped his eye, took a breath and was about to start in on “Easy Living” when he noticed Roger slipping away from the cameras, all his hair roughly combed over his face, and followed him out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's hulking Russian coworker from the gentlemen's club is intended to be a member of Hawkeye's nemesis the Tracksuit Mafia.  
> Canonically, Titus believes himself to be the reincarnation of a Japanese Geisha named Murasaki; for this reason he has researched women's history in Japan extensively and can perform a range of folk songs.  
> Kinky Boots is a Broadway musical that debuted in 2013 about a family-owned shoe factory that escapes bankruptcy by producing stiletto boots for drag queens. I think Bucky would love it, first, because every other movie in the Thirties had at least one musical number, and second, because it's a bright, happy queer story with low stakes.  
> Billie Holiday, 1915-1959, got her first recording contract in 1935. She was an innovative and influential jazz singer from Harlem. Her later life and career were plagued by abusive partners and addiction.  
> As long as homosexuality and interracial relationships were illegal, they tended to occur most openly in spaces where the law was not welcome, like bars controlled by the mob.


	7. Roger Comes Back From Vacation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings:  
> A protagonist uses an ethnic slur to belittle and intimidate.  
> Able-ist language from an antagonist.  
> Violence consistent with Captain America canon.

All good things come to an end.

Titus and Roger's romance came and went.

Titus came home to find the living room strewn with weaponry and saw that Roger himself was about to go, too.

“Titus,” Roger gasped, looking up. “I gotta run. I got twelve hours to do something very illegal, and then I gotta leave the country and I might never see you again. But before I go—”

“Oh, no you don't!” Titus shouted. “You don't get to make some heroic speech and fly off into the sunset as mysterious as you came! Do I look like Queen Dido?! I will not immolate myself in your honor, you self-important pillar of man-pain! Kimmy, tattle to me!”

Kimmy was sitting on the couch with her hands under her thighs. “It's my fault. Dong's gone—they took him!”

  
  


* * *

  
  


That morning, at eight AM in the kitchen of Al's 24 Hour Diner, Ted glanced back from his griddle as Paul Grzeskiewicz waddled over the rubber mats to hassle Blondie, another episode for the dramedy that Ted narrated constantly in his head.

“Blondie” was a Man With No Name, not blond. Once an elite operative for a secret counter-terrorist unit, he'd been forced to fake his own death when his teammates framed him for the Mandarin bombings a couple years back. Since then, Blondie had drifted from town from town, working odd jobs for cash under the table, dreaming of the day it would be safe to let his wife and young daughter know he was still alive. In the diner, Blondie showed up on time, stared straight ahead at the backsplash of his workstation with dead blue eyes six hours straight, and washed dishes with mechanical efficiency. Blondie was a decent guy—he'd once brought a pack of cigarettes to pass around on break. It didn't go over too well; Nacio, who had HATE tattooed on his forehead in thirty point font, simply pocketed half the pack, and Ted didn't want to smoke anything handed to him by a guy who never took off his dishwashing gloves.

Paul Grzeskiewicz, at the age of seven, hustled each of his first-grade classmates into a private corner, one at a time. “I'm gonna tell you a secret,” he'd said to each one, his voice already snide and slightly hoarse. “Your parents lie to you because they think it's cute. There's no such guy as Santa Claus.” He'd kept a little journal to record who'd already known, who'd believed him, and who'd broken down and cried and for how long. At twelve, he'd stopped growing. At fifteen, his only girlfriend cheated on him with his own brother. At thirty, he'd lost the last of his hair. Paul Grzeskiewicz still had that journal, and running his finger down that list of crying children was the only thing in his roach-riddled garret that would ever give him joy.

At work, Paul found his joy hassling Blondie.

Paul was a supervisor of sorts; he'd been hired to wrangle the junkies and stoners who worked for cash in the dead of the morning. Ted simply let Paul's invective wash over him every time he was late, staring at the avocado-shaped mole on his left earlobe, squinting as his vision doubled from last night's toking. Lately Paul had lost interest in disciplining Ted. Once Paul tried to drop the hammer on Nacio, but Nacio just kept mopping, snarled “Cayete, puta,” and Paul never looked sideways at Nacio again.

Blondie, though.

“Geeze, cut it closer to your shift, why don't you,” Paul snarled when Blondie showed up on time, and the next morning Blondie showed up five minutes early.

“You're in food service, cover your fuckin' hair,” Paul sniped, and Blondie put on a hairnet with his soapy gloves.

“Those things cost money, dipshit,” Paul growled, and Blondie re-used the same hairnet over and over.

“Boss ain't paying you cash for you to take fuckin' breaks, retard,” Paul barked, and Blondie stood at the sink for his entire shift from then on, gloved hands scraping and rinsing ceaselessly.

All Blondie had to do was look Paul in the eye and square his shoulders, loom a little, and the guy would fold like a wet paper tiger. But every time, Blondie would lower his eyes, stand there, and take it, saying, yes, sir. I will do better, sir. Whatever you order, sir.

Paul got a real kick out of that.

Once Paul was in a good mood, and happened to mutter, “Nice job,” as he passed on the way out to smoke in the alley. Behind his back, Blondie beamed stupidly, then he started to cry, then he puked in the sink and rinsed it hurriedly down the drain before Paul returned.

Clearly, Blondie had been emotionally damaged by his abusive father, a hard-drinking Marine sergeant who had left him with a mild brain injury and a pathological need to appease obnoxious short bald men in glasses.

Anyway, it was eight in the morning and Paul was hassling Blondie about hard water stains. The owner didn't provide a water softener or any fancy chemicals to keep the glasses from getting water spots, but Paul had discovered that Blondie had the grip strength and dexterity to buff the glass to a diamond polish with an ordinary cotton towel, and had demanded he exercise this talent on ever more types of dishware.

“Look at this!” Paul snarled, shaking a glass at his face. “It's like a mouse been pissing on it! Our customers gonna drink their orange juice outta pissware? What kinda joint you think you work for?”

“An American twenty-four hour diner,” Blondie said softly, his gloved hands rinsing steadily as he turned his head respectfully toward Paul's feet.

“Rhetorical question, retard!” Paul reached up and slapped him in the back of the head, and Blondie cringed.

“Hey!” A feminine voice from the front. A kid barged in—no, she was twenty, thirty—a red-haired white woman in a denim jacket and pink leggings, storming over the rubber mats. “Don't call my friend a retard!” She planted herself between Blondie and Paul and narrowed her eyes. “You don't use 'retard' to pick on people. That's like trying to insult somebody by saying they get to go to the Special Olympics! The Olympics, but special! It makes you sound childish, and dumb.”

“You, ah, you shouldn't be back here,” Paul said. “I can pass your message to Mr., ah . . .”

“Gordon,” the woman said. “Like Flash Gordon. And no, you can't, because it's an emergency.” She turned around, almost bumping into Blondie's chest, and Blondie blinked down at her. “Last night was date night, and Dong never showed up! I tried his phone and he's not answering. What if he got grabbed by human traffickers?”

Blondie's eyes were bouncing back and forth between Paul and the woman so fast Ted wondered if he was about to have a seizure. He seemed to make up his mind when the woman grabbed his hand: he looked down, clasped his other wet glove around her hand, and bowed his head.

When he looked up, he had a new light in his eyes, and he fixed Paul with a mean smirk. “Hey, Grzeskiewicz, whaddaya do when a Polak throws a grenade at you?”

“Ah,” said Paul.

“You take the pin out and throw it back.” He showed his teeth, and Paul flinched. “I quit. C'mon, Kimmy, I know a gal.”

And he marched out the door, head high, sopping rubber gloves on his clenched fists. Ted never saw Blondie again.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Roger and Kimmy stopped at the apartment for Roger to change his gloves in privacy and retrieve a stack of fifties from an air vent, then headed just four blocks downtown to a similarly ratty residential building. Roger leaned on the intercom for a third floor apartment. When no one answered, he buzzed more rooms until someone opened the door for “Jimmy, with pizza.” They hustled inside, took the elevator, and walked down a long hallway smelling of soup, burned onions, mildew, and urine. At the end of the hall was a door with a frosted glass window reading _Alias Investigations._

Roger rapped at the door, in the process swinging it partway open. The latch didn't work. He pulled the door shut with one hand and kept banging with the other, until a woman's voice snarled, “Shut up, shut up! Come back at two!”

“I got cash!” Roger called through the crack. “It's urgent!”

Silence from within. Then, “Wait in the lobby.”

Roger and Kimmy crept in to a large, spare space furnished with a desk, a laptop, and a litter of plastic bourbon bottles overflowing a small trash can. They heard padding feet, pissing, a running sink. Then a skinny young woman with long dark hair and purple bags under her eyes stomped in from another door, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and basketball shorts. She blinked hard, turned on the coffee maker, and looked them over. Her eyes stuck on Kimmy, and the sleep burned out of them.

“Please don't make me an accessory to murder, JB,” she said, turning away abruptly.

“It's not—a man's missing, I'm not gonna murder him,” Roger protested.

“Absolutely no murdering,” Kimmy said. 

“Cut your losses and take your wins,” said the woman. “Cause I think your girl didn't give you the whole story.”

“Dong didn't hurt me,” Kimmy protested, when Roger glanced down at her. 

“Someone did,” the woman muttered under her breath. “What's his name? Dong what?”

“Dong Nguyen. Missing since . . .” 

“Five last night,” Kimmy filled in.

“I got two grand cash to get started,” Roger said, “and the rest I'll be good for—I can pawn a few things, scrape up some new revenue. Kimmy here's a friend, and so's the kid.”

The woman groaned. “Varick Street Detention Center, Level 2 somewhere. Fuck, you got me up for nothing.” She turned the coffee maker off. “I was out till five AM watching johns solicit prostitutes, all the wrong John, and now this shit.”

“Varick Street—how do you know? Did you pick something up?”

She glared over her shoulder. “It's where INS keeps their fresh detainees. _Dong?_ Come on. If _Dong_ had jumped through the hoops to get the right papers, he'd've changed his name to something less phallic.” She disappeared past the doorway.

“Whadda I owe you?” Roger asked, pulling out his bills.

“Nothing, you brought me a bullshit case and I don't do bullshit cases,” the woman snarled. She popped back around the door. “Is that your bugout money? Two grand? How far you bugging out to, Jersey? Jesus. Keep it.” She disappeared and they heard bedsprings creaking.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“It's my fault,” Kimmy choked as Titus watched Roger scramble around the apartment, shuffling suspicious items between two duffel bags. “Dong was going to meet me in the old Hampshire hotel. It'd be like camping. We were gonna figure out how to— The chain was gone and I got in and I waited, and I fell asleep but he never came and he's not answering his phone! Roger and the private eye think he got arrested by INS and it's all my fault for asking him to break in with me!”

“It's my fault for teaching the kid just enough to get into trouble,” Roger said grimly. “Titus, I'm going to need a pillowcase from your black sheet set, and I can't promise it'll get back to you. Kimmy, you still got one of those little—” he flailed his hands a little. “Those little toot-toot, snap-snap party horns—”

“With the paper tongue, flip-flip?” She disappeared into her bedroom and rummaged through the shelves that lined the walls.

Titus cleared his throat and circled around Roger, planting himself between him and Kimmy's door. “ _What_ are you two doing? Should I be scared? Do I need to find a new place to live? Do I need to go under cover? Roger, I am not meant for the whole secret identity thing, I get too involved!”

Roger put his hand on Titus's arm. “It shouldn't get back to you. Don't leave the apartment while I'm out, and no one should connect you to me. I'll retrieve Dong Nguyen from American custody, and then I'll leave the country.” He made a face, tugged briefly as though to pull Titus into a hug, but instead let go and turned away to fuss with his equipment. “Dumb of me to pretend it wouldn't come to this.”

Kimmy slid open her bedroom door with a snap and brandished a paper party horn. “I found one!”

“Thanks, doll.” Roger turned back to his duffel bag, shuffling items.

“Are those sleigh bells?” Kimmy asked, reaching.

Roger caught her wrist. “Those are grenades.”

“Oh, God,” Titus moaned.

Roger swung the bag onto his arm. “C'mon, let's find that pillowcase.” He tugged Titus into the other bedroom and shut the door behind them.

“I always knew it would end like this,” Titus continued, blinking hard and staring up at the ceiling while Roger rummaged through the closet and under the bed. “You breaking my heart, then disapparating back into the shadows. Oh, no!” He hissed and clasped his hands. “I'm the filler in your redemption arc. I'm nobody.”

Roger popped up on hands and knees. “Titus. You're not nobody. _I'm_ nobody. But you—it's the way you're so _you_ all the time. You're _you_ in everything you do, it's blinding and it sucked me right in like a moth. I shoulda known better than to lead you on, 'cause you deserve better than a man who's half a ghost.”

“Try the closet shelf,” Titus sniffed.

Roger rose, turned, and found the black sateen sheet set under a crushed velvet tailcoat and a box of VHS tapes. He shook out a pillowcase and wrung it between his hands. “You deserve a man who loves you for  _you_ , not for who you remind him of.”

Titus slumped. “Soldier-boy, I read the writing on the wall the day Kimmy snuck you down here. Now be a gentleman and give me a hug.”

Roger tucked the pillowcase into his bag, sidestepped around the bed, and cautiously reached up to fold Titus into an embrace that quickly became crushing. He pressed a stubbled kiss to Titus's throat. “You been so good to me. I never deserved it.”

“Lucky you.” Titus squeezed back, then released him and turned his back. “Now go parachute into the sunset or whatever it is you do. Quickly, I can feel my eyes getting puffy and I have an audition next week.”

Roger sniffed and wiped his face on his sleeve, shouldered his bag, and strode out of the apartment. “I'll get your man for you, Kimmy,” he said at the threshold. “I'll help him disappear. If you ever see him again, it'll be because he finds you, so if you move, leave a forwarding address and keep your habits as regular as you can.”

“I understand,” Kimmy said, steeling herself. “Dong can't be in prison. I . . .” She choked. “I care about him and I want him to be happy.”

Roger nodded tightly. He started to shut the door, paused, and leaned back into the living room. “Titus?” he asked.

“What?” Titus snapped from the bedroom.

“If I find a way to do it, that's safe—when I go, if you're not steady with someone—could we sext?”

Titus sighed loudly enough to be heard from the street. “Yes, we can sext. Now get going, Agent Bourne.”

And that was the last time Titus or Kimmy ever saw the man calling himself Roger Gordon.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The Varick Street Federal Building was a great brick block, Art Deco in its ornaments but brutalist in the whole, its walls ventilated by rows of tall mirrored windows that left the columns of sandy brick between standing out like the bars of a cell. It sat in southwest Manhattan, adjoining both Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village.

Just before noon, a man in a tailored suit, clean-shaven, dark hair loose around his collar, swinging a briefcase, ambled through the double doors and into the lobby. At the security line, he removed his belt and shoes and placed them in a plastic dish on a conveyor belt beside his briefcase to be scanned. The metal detector made an odd noise when he stepped through it. The guards hemmed and hawed and eventually asked him to submit to a pat down. He stood obligingly and they let him through. At the reception desk, he flashed a business card, a smudged ID, and a distracting smile. “Foggy Nelson. I'm to represent a recent detainee, Dong Nguyen.”

He clipped his fresh visitor ID to his lapel with gloved fingers. As he passed under a camera in the hallway toward the elevators, he lowered his head and fluffed his hair with a pocket comb.

Long, logical, beige hallways and small musty elevators joined the courtrooms, wards, and interview rooms that made up the detention center. The man rode up to the second floor, stepped out onto chipped linoleum, sniffed the misery of bleach and body odor on the air. To the west, a panel of steel bars and mesh blocked the hallway. A middle-aged man with black bristly hair lounged in a glassed-in guard post. “Say, buddy, which way to the can?” the man in the suit asked him.

“Back past the elevator and to your right,” the guard said, without looking up from his phone.

The man in the suit passed a caseworker and two ICE officers in the hall and another caseworker at the urinal. He shut himself into a stall, dropped his drawers, hitched one leg up on the toilet seat, and eased a plastic bag containing three shining metal spheres out from a body cavity. He took a cheap black zip-up windbreaker and a roomy backpack from the briefcase, changed out his suit jacket, slung the backpack on, and abandoned the briefcase. The steel spheres went in his pockets, the bag down the toilet. He waited until the restroom was empty, washed his right hand, hid his face under a balaclava, and strode out into the hall.

There were a pair of lawyers in the hallway. The man shoved them aside into the brick wall, crashed up against the window of the guard station. The guard had one hand on his sidearm, the other on the intercom mike, but reinforced glass separated him from the intruder. The man held up one of the metal spheres so the guard could see, twisted the cap so it began to blink faintly. He drew back his left arm, punched right through the safety glass, and dropped the blinking sphere while ducking out of sight beneath the window. The sphere landed in the station with an ominous clink. 

The guard panicked for a long breath, then unbolted the door and burst outside. The man in the balaclava leapt up and seized him with terrific strength by the throat. He pulled them both into the guard station, with the blinking sphere on the floor. He snatched away the guard's sidearm, and flung him across the room to crash against the corkboard and drop to the floor in a stunned heap. The guard stared from his own gun to the quietly-blinking sphere to the gun again. Horror turned to indignation.

“Give me your clothes,” the man in the balaclava said. He rolled the blinking ball into reach with his foot, knelt, and shut it off with the hand not holding the gun. He reached behind him and locked them in. “If you stall you'll get a concussion.”

The guard undressed.

He stuffed the guard's clothing into the backpack and clipped his keys, cuffs, and holstered pistol to his belt, then restrained him in a stress position with his neck and thumbs tied to his shoelaces. He turned and scanned the inmate roster.

A commotion—ICE agents and two FBI men hustled down the hallway. The man peered through the hole his fist had made in the crack-crazed window. As the men in the hall passed the bathroom door, he re-activated the metal sphere and pitched it at them. The men piled into the restroom before the sphere blew.

The explosion bent the destroyed window and rattled the air vents. A fire alarm blared. The man hit the fire suppression lever for good measure, opened the master switch for the curtain gates, and strolled out into the rubble and sirens and rain.

The security forces were not an assault response force. The man scanned the hall where water showered from cracked pipes, electric wires sparked above gaping displaced ceiling tiles. The fluorescent lights were dark, shattered or dead, for a hundred feet. From the bathroom, scuffling sounds and the snap and mutter of two-way radios.

The man stalked between the cells. They were packed three beds to a space, with wide barred doors and a single toilet, crowded with men and women in jumpsuits, mostly short, mostly dark, mostly taking cover together behind the slim but substantial shelter of the steel sleeping platforms.

Cells 5, 12, 17, 19, and 23 each held inmates apprehended the previous night. He reached cell 17 when he spotted a slim young man with short straight dark hair shielding another inmate under a bunk.

The man unlocked the cell and knelt down, ignoring Dong Nguyen's flinch. “I am I, Comrade Roger,” the man said in broken Vietnamese.

Dong Nguyen unfolded from beneath the bench. “Roger. What are you doing here? You'll get yourself shot!”

“Do you want to stay in America if I make you disappear, surrender your name? Think.”

Dong studied the man for a moment, as the man glanced up and down the dim and noisy hallway, folded his arms and slouched on one hip. Dong sat on the lower bunk and lowered his forehead into his palms. A young Indonesian man crept out from under the bed and slipped to the opposite corner of the cell, as far from Dong and the man in the balaclava as possible.

“Would I disappear forever?” Dong asked.

“Two years, certainly. Perhaps forever.”

Dong studied his hands. His palms were thickened from bicycle handlebars, his wrists aching, his legs and lungs strong from endless racing through the city delivering Chinese food. He had already left his brother and sisters, his mother and father and aunts and uncles, his teachers and his best friend from childhood. Once a month, he had managed to wire money home—never less than fifty dollars, once three hundred. He thought of the medicine that money could buy for his grandfather. The schooling for his youngest sister. The clothes for his nephew. Everything was expensive in America, but what he could save, how much power it grew at home. “I will stay,” Dong resolved. “I understand I may never see my 'best girl' again.”

“Then come,” the man said. “Do as I say and be silent.” He unlocked the door and darted in, pulled the gun. “Fight me,” The man commanded. “Try to run.”

Dong knew a little Tae Kwon Do but only from his troubled uncle who had died when he was ten. The man in the balaclava aimed the gun at the other prisoner, and reached for Dong with his free hand. Dong struck at his gut, kicked at his instep, snapped up with his elbow at the man's jaw as he was backed into the wall. The man was fast. When his hits did land, the man made no flinch. The man caught him around the waist and flipped him over his shoulder, and something about the peculiar strength and rigidity of the man's arm, and the sound and scent and inexorable calm with which he moved awoke an ancient terror in Dong, and from where he dangled in a fireman's carry he struck out in panic with power he had not known he had. The man swept out of the cell and locked it behind him.

The man marched to the end of the hall where another gate waited and the fluorescent bulbs were still lit. Sprinklers poured down on them. A black glass globe gazed down from the undamaged ceiling.

“Kneel,” the man ordered, slinging Dong to the floor. “Hands behind your back.” Cold steel cuffs closed around Dong's damp wrists. The man unslung his backpack and pulled out a black cloth sack, shook it out and tugged it roughly over Dong's head. It clung to his face and he had to concentrate not to suck it against his nose and mouth as he panted. “Put this in your mouth, the man said, reaching under the cloth hood. He held a small, somewhat soggy plastic and paper object against Dong's cheek so he could feel the shape of it, then stuck the plastic tube part between his lips. “When I say 'hut,' you will cough and be dead.”

Dong knelt, trembling in the spray, cuffs, digging into his forearms as he strained despite himself.

“Hut!” his friend barked.

Dong coughed. The paper tongue of the party horn in his mouth pushed the black bag away from his face for an instant. He let himself tip forward to the slippery tile.

A gunshot sounded behind him and he bucked up, rolled onto his back. Water plastered the cloth to his nose and mouth and he rolled back to his side, desperate for air. He sucked in a breath and as his head cleared, he felt shame like an electric prod, and after that, indignation—Dong had moved in front of the camera and ruined whatever effect his friend was trying to achieve, but Dong was just the son of a garbage collector, not a spy, not a professional who could lie still despite unexpected gunshots.

A second shot sounded. Dong jerked again. The other man pulled the bag from his head, holstered the gun, and slipped something from his left hand into his pants pocket. His leather glove looked a bit shredded and something silver glinted in his palm. Dong lost sight of it as the man knelt behind him to unlock the cuffs. Dong staggered to his feet and looked at the camera. The globe that had hidden it was shattered and the camera itself dangled in pieces.

“There are witnesses listening,” the man said, explaining the second shot.

“Won't someone find the second bullet?” Dong asked. 

“No.” The man looked guilty, and rubbed his pocket. “Hold still.” And then he punched Dong in the nose.

“Dogs fucked your mother!” Dong bellowed incredulously. Blood poured over his lip and down his wet jumpsuit. 

“Let it drop here,” The man said, pointing over a tile square. Dong looked up at him through watering eyes, and bowed his head to bleed on it. “Good,” the man announced when a foot-wide stain had accumulated. He wrung out the black cloth sack and handed it to him to press against his nose. “Comrade, you are murdered in prison today. Now we go up. Be still.” He hauled Dong up in a fireman's carry again, making Dong's face throb, and ran full-speed down the hallway between the cells. Dong supposed he looked dead enough if any other inmates dared to glance at them as they pounded past. 

The gate at the end was still open. They thundered through it, stopped at the elevator. The man drew the gun and fired, first low at the door of the men's restroom, then at the women's. Then he holstered his gun again, wedged his gloved fingers into the seam of the elevator doors, and pried them open against a squeal of mechanical protest. Dong hoped to see the dry and brightly lit interior of the car that had brought him up that morning. Instead, he saw a black void, a half-dozen cables running up and down the center.

The man leaned against one door to block it open. He crossed his arms and looked at Dong very seriously, his blue eyes hard and bright through the eyeholes of his balaclava. “Hold tight to me, you will live,” he said. “If we continue, if you slip, I cannot catch you.”

Dong peered down the elevator shaft, wiped blood off his face. “I am strong enough to ride on your back,” Dong said. “And they say fear makes you stronger.”

“That's the spirit,” the man said in English. He crouched, let Dong climb onto his back, lock his legs around his waist and his arms diagonal across his chest. The man bounced on his toes experimentally, and when Dong held steady, he leapt into the void.

They stopped abruptly and twirled and bounced on a half-circle. Dong made an unmanly wheeze in the man's ear, sputtering blood. The elevator doors just above them whirred shut.

“Don't breathe too rapidly,” the man warned Dong as he began to climb hand-over-hand up the steel cable. “Count.” His voice echoed up and down the shaft.

“How high?” Dong gasped.

“Hold for ten heartbeats. Out five, in five.”

That wasn't what Dong had meant, but the man's advice had always proved technically correct in the past—if not, on reflection, wise or appropriate. He counted his heartbeat and metered his breaths as they rose, Dong trembling and the other man steady and tireless, past one set of elevator doors after another. Every time they neared the sliver of light that slipped through the seams, Dong readied himself for another monkey-like leap across the gap. But the man climbed on.

Machinery above sent a hum and and tremor ringing down the cables, and hydraulics hissed many stories below them. They began to rise rapidly. Dong stifled a scream, imagining them flying up to the roof and dismembered in the cable pulleys above. The man made a pleased grunt and let the cable whiz through one hand, controlling their ascent. Dong wondered how his flesh wasn't burning.

Suddenly the man reached out with his free hand and grabbed something in the dark. He let go of the cable and for an instant Dong and his friend both dangled from his four fingers. The man found another protrusion to grab, the lip of an I-beam, and monkey-walked until his feet knocked against a railing.

They passed over and dropped to a small steel catwalk.

“Comrade, you can let go, please,” he said, shrugging to dislodge Dong. With great mental effort and physical pain, Dong unclenched his fingers from his own wrists and fell in a shuddering heap to the grating.

“Not to seem ungrateful,” he said, “but I wish you'd left me in my cell.”

“Builds character,” the man said in English. He kicked open a door and hauled Dong out into the chill wind and blinding sunlight of the rooftop.

The man pulled a watch out of his damp pocket. “Six minutes. We must join the crowd before helicopters come. We change clothes, me first.” And he ducked back into the machine room, pulling the door shut, leaving Dong alone in the cold wind on the roof in his soaking orange jumpsuit, tenderly pinching his nostrils as he scanned the sky for helicopters.

After a minute, a hand appeared and flung a damp pile of professional clothing onto the gravel. Dong realized that he would not be offered the privacy of the machine room, and stripped down to his boxers. The pants, the shirt, and the jacket all hung on him.

His friend emerged after another minute, dressed in a guard's uniform with a cheap windbreaker on top and a different pair of leather gloves. He made Dong stand still with his arms and legs spread, got a stapler out of the backpack, and confidently stapled the cuffs up so the suit could pass for Dong's size. The moment he finished, he stalked to the roof edge where a pair of aluminum hooks clung.

“Why didn't we just go _down_ the elevator shaft?” Dong cried in exasperation.

“You know why.”

Dong did know. When evading a security system, the weakest points were routes the designers assumed were physically impossible.

From the aluminum hooks on the roof edge, a window-washing platform dangled, empty, three stories below them. Dong climbed on the man's back again, and the man dithered at the edge a moment before removing his mangled left glove and shoving it in a pocket. He had a robot hand. “Never tell anyone,” he hissed, “or people will torture you to find me.”

Dong squeezed his shoulder. At this point he wasn't even surprised.

They whizzed down the cable, dropped into the window-washer basket, and then rode sedately down to the sidewalk and disembarked. They got a few curious looks, but most of the nosy passersby were drawn to the flashing squad cars and SWAT vans swarming the front entrance. They fell into the stream of foot traffic heading uptown, and soon they were blocks away, surrounded by the busy and the preoccupied.

“Your place have security?” the man asked.

“No, but Jie Ho and her kids will be there.”

“Then we go direct to safehouse.” He led Dong to the subway, changed lines once, took them out of Manhattan, into the Bronx. They caught a taxi to a grubby motel between a liquor store and a strip club. Dong's friend bought them a room for four hours, then disappeared to places unknown.

Dong hung the suit above the steam register and took a warm shower. Thankfully he was just cold, not dirty, because there was no soap. He dried off with a scratchy towel and sat on the floor rather than touch the bed. He turned on the TV, a luxury. The show was . . . not _Friends._ He probably shouldn't be watching it. It was free, though, with the room.

His friend returned three episodes later in dry clothes, bearing a shopping bag of more clothing in Dong's size, and a thick manila envelope. “They wouldn't take my money,” he said with a puzzled expression. “He said I saved his grandfather in the Afghan war.”

Dong had nothing to say to that except, “Lucky. What is it?”

The man dumped a stack of papers and bills out onto the bedspread while Dong dressed. “Kevin Tran. Second-generation Korean-American, twenty-three years, missing six months. High school _transcript_ , _vaccination_ record, _social security_ card...”

“He looks nothing like me,” Dong said, scowling at the driver's license. _Korean._ Really.

“They won't know,” the man said, tapping his own nose to indicate Dong's blooming black eyes. “He's also taller than you, so when you go to renew your license, stuff your shoes.” He sat on the dubious bedspread and looked up at Dong. “There are particulars that change every year that I can't know, but the principles are firm. They may chase you two weeks, they may chase you twenty years. They may not recognize your face, but they will monitor the people you knew, and most easily they can follow your money. If you sent money home, make a new account with a new bank. You can hide in _New York_ , but not in _Hell's Kitchen_. If you leave the city, you can disappear among your people but they can never know your story. Keep it secret forever, even from your grandchildren. If the joys of your past ever find you, danger follows close. Understand?”

Dong's heart, despite his orders, looked back on his frightening and lonely first months in America, when he could ask directions to the bathroom but not understand the answer, when he covered the island twice over on his bicycle every day for people who worked him like a serf just as their own grandparents had slaved in America decades ago. He had thought it would be—not easy, but survivable—to be a man alone. But the thought of starting over again, without the other boys at the restaurant dreaming mad dreams together in the pauses between breathless work, without Jie Ho's daughters sharing the surplus food he brought home (always too much for himself alone), without Kimmy cheering for him like he'd caught her a star as they danced on the roof of a theater, that thought could have driven him back to prison.

Survival got easier with practice. (Hope grew fainter.)

“I understand,” he told his friend. “But what about you? After being on camera, don't you have to run?”

“There's a guy in town still owes me back pay,” he replied in English. “Don't worry about me. It was my damn fault you got into this mess.”

Dong frowned. He extended his hand firmly, and the man blinked at it, then accepted his handshake. Dong wondered fleetingly if that had been the wrong gesture. He pumped the man's fist in time with his words. “You are a good friend. Stay safe and never forget that.”

The man patted his forearm and Dong dropped his grip.

“No homo,” Dong said, as was customary.

“Almost forgot.” The man opened his backpack and passed him two stacks of fifty-dollar bills.

Dong took them in sweating palms. Somehow, holding the money he would need for bus tickets and food and rental deposits made the whole escape from prison loom more immediate and real than the adventure in the elevator shaft.

“Thanks, buddy,” Dong choked in English.

“Forget about it,” the man replied. “Think you can take it from here?”

“I did it once, didn't I?” Dong asked.

“Good luck, pal.” His friend tipped an imaginary hat with a gloved hand as he left the motel. The next time Dong would see him would be on international breaking news.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Pollack" was totally an offensive slur in Bucky's time, and that's how he intended it. I headcanon that he was never as righteous and principled as Steve. Nowadays, if I was Polish and somebody called me a Pollack, I'm pretty sure I'd be like, WTF are you on, buddy? But yeah, rude.
> 
> Jessica Jones cameo! 
> 
> Is this really how to break out of INS's detention center at Varick Street? I don't know, because I only looked at the outside of the building on Google Maps. (Probably should have been ICE instead of INS, but let's pretend we live in a nation of laws, m'kay?" Shout out to my hero Donald Westlake for inspiring Bucky's use of props and deception here. Also, Leverage.


	8. Epilogue! (Titus Updates His Wardrobe)

Four days into his post-Roger funk, Titus Andromedon put on shoes and picked up a grocery bag and shuffled upstairs to check his mail. Sometimes there would be a card for him saying he'd won a toaster oven or a trip to Aruba. He never showed up to collect his prizes, but it was nice to know he'd won them. He stored them in a folder in a decoupaged shoebox under his bed, on top of a much thinner folder of audition call-backs.

Today there was: heat bill, credit card application for another tenant, Mattel catalog, collection letter for an ever-growing late fee for a VHS he'd failed to return to Blockbuster in 1992, library overdue notice from last month, and.

At the bottom.

A small cream-colored envelope of heavy paper.

Containing a small, cream-colored card gracefully inscribed with a fountain pen.

Inviting him to return to the tailor's shop.

His suit was finished.

Titus sang a tremolo, rising and falling, “Oh-oh-oh-oh-my-noooooo!” as he gazed at the card. The notice was dated two weeks ago, well before Roger had fled to parts unknown. He should have gone back to the shop with him. He'd seen Roger eyeing him up at the fitting, the kind of look he'd once starved for as a high-school linebacker in the best shape of his life. Whatever it was Roger liked to see, Titus liked him looking at it.

Titus considered sending Roger a selfie, except Roger had vanished leaving no phone or forwarding address, like the pulp paperback superspy he was.

But dammit, Titus could blow a kiss in the mirror for him.

He had three hours until he had to show up for work. He put on his comfy walking shoes and his softest purple rayon cardigan and a green Pashmina shawl, and took the subway uptown to the little tailor shop tucked between a skateboard shop and an adult video store.

Even on his third visit, he had a hard time finding it. The shop's bell-on-a-string jingled as he slipped inside, and after five minutes posing pensively before the full length mirror in the bare lobby, Titus heard the elderly assistant tailor shuffle out of the back room to say, “Mr. Andromedon! We've been expecting you. Come this way, sir.”

He jumped a foot in the air and stepped on the back of the man's shoe once as he followed him into the shop, past the fitting rooms hung with brown and mustard curtains, past bolts of cloth and worktables laid out with paper patterns, until they reached the row of woolen suits concealed in zippered cloth bags. The tailor picked out a bag, double-checked the tag, and unzipped the protective shroud to reveal Roger's gift.

Months ago, while Titus and Roger had frolicked through Bloomingdales blowing Roger's blood money on cashmere, Roger had slipped in a comment here, a question there, mainly to catch up with the mores and styles of the times, but in the course of answering them, Titus had arrived at a finer understanding of what he wanted and needed from his clothes, of what an investment piece for Titus Andromedon would look like.

It was a tuxedo, because Titus was an entertainer, not a banker.

It appeared deep black, a dense wool drape with a weave so tight it looked like suede, but at the edges where it caught the light there was a faint sheen of purple—reds and blues within the fibers. The silk lining was a deep amethyst to do Prince proud. The lapels sliced just so, the button gleamed. It smelled expensive. When Titus took the hanger in his hands, he nearly dropped it from the unexpected weight.

“Please, try it on,” the tailor said, waving Titus to one of the dressing rooms. “Consider today your final fitting.”

Titus nodded shakily and wiped the sweat off one palm, then the other. He took the suit into the dressing room, stripped down, and slid into it tenderly.

It came with a classic white cotton shirt and a black silk bowtie. Black suspenders with buttons. Titus looked down at his Reeboks with regret.

Shirt on, tie tied, wool trousers suspended, Titus slung on the jacket. It molded to his torso like an armored hug. He buttoned the single button, his shoulders rounding easily, no tug under his armpits as in his groom's tuxedo or the velvet suit he'd rescued from a theater surplus sale. He stood up straight. The jacket followed him like a new skin, grazing his back, not constricting but uplifting. He emerged from the fitting room, dazed.

“Move,” the tailor instructed. “Sit down. Cross your arms. Raise them.” He brought a chair. Titus sat. He stood. He hitched up one leg on the chair and belted out a phrase from _My Fair Lady_ over joined hands. 

“Do the items satisfy you, sir?” the old man asked.

“Perfectolutely,” Titus said.

He walked out wearing it.

“Sir!” the tailor called behind him. Titus hurried back to collect his street clothes and the garment bag.

He rode the subway in his tuxedo and tennis shoes, garment bag with clothing in it nonchalantly slung over one shoulder. A knot of tourists caught him on the way out of the car. “Omigod it's Tituss Burgess!” a woman cried in a Midwestern accent. “It's celebrated actor/singer/comedian of stage and television Tituss Burgess! Here, sign my baby!” And she presented him with a blue Sharpie and the pudgy white belly of her startled little girl.

_Titus_ ♥, Titus signed.

“Can you sing something from _The Little Mermaid?_ ” her husband pressed.

Titus could. The doors shut and the train rumbled on. He sang for a shifting crowd of locals and tourists and Broadway enthusiasts, and maybe he wasn't _who_ they thought he was, but as he filled the car with his voice alone, and they smiled and tapped their feet and cheered between the numbers, he knew that he could be exactly _what_ they thought he was: a star.

He took the train all around the island before he broke away to the apartment to change and put on his werewolf makeup before heading to work.

  
  


* * *

  
  


At midnight, he returned to find an unsettling hooded figure hunched on Lillian's front stoop, not one of the usual heroin dealers. He sidestepped when the man rose to block his path to the basement apartment. “Listen, I don't get paid 'till the fifteenth,” he announced.

“Living paycheck-to-paycheck?” The figure tsk-tsked. “What is our economy coming to? Support our struggling artists and assassins. Speaking of, I tracked the assassin who hired me to sub for him to this address, any idea where he fucked off to?”

“You must be mistaken,” Titus demurred, backing away. The man turned to follow him, and his features caught the streetlight: chiseled cheekbones and a complexion like the last blistered hotdog out of the bottom of the boiler at the county fair. 

“Omigod you're Tituss Burgess!” the man squeaked, clutching his hands under his chin. 

Titus surreptitiously patted his werewolf muttonchops. “Why—yes, I am.”

“And that makes _you_ Titus Andromedon! And Kimmy the star of the show! She and I, we're a match made in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, bee-tee-dubs, you should see the woman's subconscious, it's like _Happy Tree Friends_ with a side of _Se7en—_ picture it: _He's a disfigured trigger for hire, she's a sun-deprived Polyanna who wants fifteen years of her life back, together they fight crime!_ Hey! For a sequel?”

Sadly, the author cannot commit to a sequel.

“Eh.” The man blew a raspberry. _Sub voce_ , he told Titus, “She's too prudish to write me like I need.”

An air conditioner creaked threateningly overhead, flimsy fastenings ready to give way.

The man ignored the creaking, pointedly, and continued. “Anywho, if you're Titus Andromedon and your roomie is the eponymous Kimmy Schmidt, then that makes Mysterious Mr. Moneybags who wanted me in the Winter Soldier costume—Oh, I _knew_ it, what kind of cold bastard re-deads Bucky Barnes for realz, in a _fanfic?_ Seriously. We have movies for that.” He dug a crumpled gold business card out of his sweatshirt pocket. “This was gonna be a bribe but I'll give it to you for taking care of the guy.”

Titus turned it over in his hands. It was minimal, just a phone number on one side, and, in sharpie, _I O U one favor_ (o)(o) on the other.

“Thanks,” Titus said, fidgeting with the card. The other man's hands were moist and scabby, and left an odd smear on the paper. Titus' tailcoat didn't have pockets.

“Cameo over. Toodles!” The man blew a kiss at Titus—always appreciated except when the blower had a face like broiled potatoes au gratin—and capered down the alley to scramble away up the fire escape.

Titus wondered if he could ask the man to repair the oven.

  
  


* * *

  
  


After a grueling afternoon pounding the pavement with a thick stack of thin resumes printed out at the library, Kimmy stomped downstairs into the apartment and flung herself backward onto the couch, one arm draped over her eyes.

Titus poked his head out of his room, then bustled out and hauled her back up. “Kimzilla! Do you not see the thousand dollars of fine wool worsted you just covered in fanny creases?” She looked down, to see a black tux, now slightly rumpled, laid out on the couch like a corpse in a coffin. “ _Why?_ Why must everyone trample my dreams?”

“Nobody wants to trample your dreams, Titus,” Kimmy groaned, too hot and frustrated to be polite.

“ _Hashtag_ , white ppl be like, _hashtag_ , follow your dreams!” Titus sing-songed. He scowled. “At least look before you divebomb!”

Kimmy looked down at the suit again. “Oh.  _Ooooh._ Roger, I'm so sorry. I hope I didn't elbow you in the nuts.”

“What.” Titus said. 

Kimmy turned to him and whispered behind her hand. “Far be it from me to judge. Suit Roger is way lighter than Can Man. You should stuff him with pillows so he'll be cuddly!”

“What!” Titus yelped.

“But we only have the one couch!” Kimmy continued. “Roger can't just live on the couch all day!”

“Kimmy, I am not acting out some depraved fantasy where a man who supports, comforts, and appreciates me wants to live with me forever. That suit is the last thing I have left of Roger—and I look sexy and imposing in it—” He choked up. “And there's no room in my closet.”

“No!”

Titus showed her into the bedroom. The closet was jammed with jeweltone polyester, batik print rayon, and a rainbow of pleather. Kimmy wedged her arms between the clothes and one wall and shoved to the side, winning an inch of space. The wooden hanging rod creaked alarmingly.

“See?” she panted. “Room. Get Roger, hurry, I can't hold this ten seconds!”

Titus drew a cream-colored card from his breast pocket and flourished it in front of her face.

“'Care of your be-spoke suit,” she read, extracting her arms from the grip of Titus's wardrobe. “Contract a bonded and insured dry-cleaning specialty house for routine cleansing.' I guess you can't spill spaghetti on it.”

“I never eat on a date,” Titus said airily. “Read the bottom.”

“Storage. Hang tightly sealed in an insect-proof garment bag, allowing at least an inch of space between other garments to allow airflow and prevent wrinkling.” Kimmy wrinkled her nose at the jampacked closet. “Oh.”

“I told you. There is no room here, for the finest item of clothing I have ever touched.”

“So get rid of some of this stuff!” Kimmy exclaimed.

Titus drew himself up, nostrils flaring. “Kimmy, I am taking you to the library because there's a movie I want you to watch.” He pointed a finger between her eyes and swallowed. “ _Sophie's Choice._ ”

Kimmy planted her feet and set her jaw. “All right. But first I'm going to watch _Titus's Choice._ I'm gonna watch you line these guys up from lamest to raddest and chop the deadweight!”

“You're _inhuman,_ ” Titus protested.

“That's right,” Kimmy said grimly. “I'm a Mole Woman.”

In the end, it took Kimmy recruiting Lillian the landlady for backup (“You're a beautiful butterfly! These clothes are for a caterpillar. A smaller, more hopeful caterpillar with his whole life ahead of him. There's a bright young person out there who needs these thigh-high sneakers. Or this sequined caftan you haven't worn in years!”) and four hours of agonized sorting before Titus successfully stocked his closet with items that he liked and could still fit in, while leaving elbow room for the Tuxedo. Kimmy ran uptown to help Jacqueline with something urgent, and Lillian escorted Titus to the local second hand store, a black trash bag nestled in his arms like a foundling infant.

The warped sidewalk was marked off with cones and spray paint. Lillian hissed at the signs. “Public safety upgrades. Driving up innocent people's property values. _The nerve_.”

As she hustled Titus past, one small hand firm around his elbow to prevent any back-tracking, a man hollered behind them, “Hey, Mister, you makin' a charitable donation? 'Cause I'd make a charitable donation in that ass!”

Titus tried to turn on his heel, ending up half-dragging, half-pivoting around Lillian. There was only one man looking at them, a big white man with a strong jaw and a large nose, standing among the orange cones, wearing a safety vest and hard hat. He shook a can of paint suggestively and grinned at Titus.

“Excuse me?” Titus squeaked, clutching his bag of clothes. 

“Oh, Titus,” Lillian breathed, “Savor these moments, like boobs, or teeth, you never think you'll miss them.”

“You like it? I'm trying something new,” the workman said. 

“Don't _tease_ me like that,” Titus scolded. He hefted his bag. “Can't you see I'm struggling with a personal sacrifice?”

The man looked down at the paint can in his hand, suddenly uncertain. “I'm uh. I'm not teasing.”

“Just what you need, Titus, a rebound!” Lillian prodded. “Go, talk to the boy!”

Titus dragged his feet a bit. The man was stubbly, and bulky, in a way that just sort of happened instead of crafted with weightlifting and artful shaving. His clothes were dull and rough and torn in places that surely weren't intentional. He smelled like strange oils and very cheap cologne. His friendly, squinty eyes drank Titus in and his back straightened.

“Well, who are you anyway?” Titus demanded. “You're not from long ago and far away, are you?”

“Born and raised in Jersey,” the man said. “I'm thirty-seven.”

“No secret lives? No mysterious past?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “My ex-girlfriend still thinks I'm a Mormon 'cause I said I was saving myself for marriage.”

“Are you still in the closet?” Titus demanded incredulously.

“No!” the man protested. “I'm just only out to myself right now, you know?”

“So you holler at strange men on the street?” Titus tsked. “You're a baby tragedy. What's your name?”

“I'm Mike,” the man said, holding out his hand to shake, then dropping it because Titus's arms were full. “Politano. But everyone calls me Mikey.”

“Titus Andromedon,” Titus said, also feeling the urge to stick out his hand. “Everyone around here calls me Titus.” He clutched the bag of clothing to his chest and glanced across the street at the thrift store. “Stay _right here._ I'm going to run and drop these off, and when I get back, you're giving me your digits.”

Mikey grinned. His eyes crinkled in a way that meant lots of practice or that he was just genuinely happy. “Are you serious? My first time flirting with a man and I get my first gay date?”

“Michael,” said Titus firmly, “I've just recovered from an emotional break-up. It wouldn't be fair for me to break your heart with a rebound relationship.”

Mikey's face fell and Titus felt distantly guilty.

“So we should do this right,” Titus continued. “First, I teach you the history and customs of our people. Then, we see where our hearts lead.”

“You'd do that?” Mikey exclaimed.

“As soon as we're both free, I'll take you to Brooklyn. Titus Andromedon is taking you on a Pride Walk.”

* * *

 

Some miracles aren't the people who stay, but the hope they leave behind.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Titus Andromedon is played by Tituss Burgess, a _very successful_ actor and singer, who notably played Sebastian in the Broadway version of The Little Mermaid.
> 
> Yes, Bucky hired Deadpool to kill HYDRA for him, claiming to have killed the Winter Soldier and cut off his arm.
> 
> Yes, the construction worker who fell into an open manhole when Dong flirted aggressively with him on the way to a date with Kimmy, was Mikey Politano.
> 
> Kimmy's first boyfriend Can Man was very real. And not very cuddly.


End file.
